The first thing Elias noticed each morning was the absence of silence.
It wasn't a voice, not exactly. It was more like a pressure behind his eyes, a hum just below the threshold of hearing, a thought that arrived in his mind already fully formed—and yet somehow not his own.
You should drink water.
He was thirsty. He hadn't realised it until the thought appeared, and then suddenly he was swinging his legs out of bed, padding to the bathroom, filling a glass from the tap. The water was cold. It felt good going down.
It wasn't until he was back in bed, staring at the ceiling, that he wondered: Had I been thirsty, or had I been told I was thirsty?
The question faded quickly, buried under the weight of a new day.
It had started three weeks ago, on a Tuesday.
Elias remembered the date because it was the day of the quarterly audit at work, a chaos he'd been dreading for months. He'd woken up already anxious, his chest tight, his mind spinning through worst-case scenarios. By the time he reached the office, he could feel the panic attack coiling in his stomach like a snake preparing to strike.
Then, suddenly, the feeling was gone.
Not faded. Not suppressed. Gone. As if someone had reached into his skull and simply... removed it.
He'd blinked, standing in the elevator, and felt a strange, hollow calm settle over him. The audit happened. He was efficient, focused, untroubled. His boss praised his composure. His coworkers shot him confused glances, as if they'd been expecting a different man entirely.
That night, lying in bed, he'd felt a flicker of unease. That wasn't normal. That wasn't me.
But the unease, too, had faded. And in the days that followed, he stopped thinking about it.
The second week, the thoughts became more frequent.
You should call your mother.
He hadn't spoken to her in six months. The distance had been intentional—a slow, quiet drifting apart after years of her subtle cruelties, her ability to make him feel small with a single raised eyebrow. He'd been happier since creating that space.
But the thought arrived, and before he knew it, his phone was in his hand, her number was ringing, and her voice was on the other end saying, "Elias? Is something wrong?"
"No," he heard himself say. "I just wanted to hear your voice."
The words tasted like someone else's mouth had spoken them.
He started keeping a journal on the nineteenth day.
It was a small notebook, the kind you'd buy at a drugstore, its pages thin and blue-lined. He hid it in the back of his closet, under a box of old tax returns, because he wasn't sure who he was hiding it from—only that he needed to.
Day 19, he wrote. Something is inside my head. I don't know how it got there. I don't know what it wants. But I can feel it now, moving behind my thoughts like a shadow. Like someone walking through rooms I didn't know I had.
The act of writing helped. It made the thoughts tangible, gave them weight and shape. He could look at the words on the page and say: This is mine. This is real.
But even as he wrote, he felt the pressure building behind his eyes. A gentle push.
You're being paranoid. You're stressed. You're imagining things.
He shook his head, kept writing.
It wants me to stop. It wants me to believe I'm crazy. That's how I know I'm not.
The dreams started on Day 22.
He was standing in an endless white room, no walls, no ceiling, no floor—just whiteness in every direction. And standing across from him was a figure. A man. His own face, his own body, but the eyes were wrong. Too still. Too knowing.
"You're fighting," the other Elias said. His voice was Elias's voice, but flattened, empty of inflection. "Why?"
"Because you're not me."
"Aren't I?" The figure took a step closer. The whiteness seemed to pulse. "I have your memories. Your thoughts. Your fears. I know what you wanted for breakfast when you were seven years old. I know the name of the girl you kissed behind the gym in tenth grade. I know the sound your father made when he found you crying in the garage after he told you you'd never amount to anything. I am more you than you are, some days."
Elias felt his chest tighten. "Then why do I feel like I'm disappearing?"
The figure smiled. It was his smile, but it didn't reach the too-still eyes. "Because you are. Slowly. Thought by thought. Memory by memory. Soon there won't be enough of you left to fight. And then I'll be all that remains."
Elias woke gasping, his sheets soaked with sweat, his heart pounding against his ribs like a trapped animal. For a long moment, he didn't know where he was. The room was dark, unfamiliar, full of shadows that seemed to breathe.
Then the pressure returned, gentle and soothing.
It was just a dream. Go back to sleep. Everything is fine.
He lay back down. His eyes closed.
But in the space between wakefulness and oblivion, he made a decision.
He stopped sleeping on Day 25.
It wasn't sustainable—he knew that—but sleep was when the presence felt strongest, when the boundaries between them blurred and he woke with thoughts that weren't his own already playing in his head like a song he couldn't unhear.
He drank coffee. He walked the apartment at night, tracing the same path from bedroom to kitchen to living room and back again. He talked to himself, out loud, just to hear a voice he still recognised.
"You're Elias," he whispered, pacing. "You're thirty-four years old. You work in accounting. You hate the colour yellow because of a bad experience with a school bus in first grade. Your favourite book is The Hobbit. You've never told anyone that you cried at the end because it felt like saying goodbye to friends."
You're exhausting yourself, the presence whispered back. You can't keep this up forever.
"Maybe not. But I can keep it up longer than you think."
And then what? What happens when your body finally gives out? I'll still be here. I'll still be waiting.
Elias stopped pacing. He stood in the middle of his living room, the first gray light of dawn seeping through the blinds, and for the first time in days, he smiled.
"No," he said. "You won't."
He'd read once, years ago, about a psychological phenomenon called thought suppression. The more you tried not to think about something, the more your brain circled back to it. White bears. Pink elephants. The one thing you couldn't have.
It had given him an idea.
For the next three days, he thought about nothing but the presence. He focused on it with every waking moment. He imagined it as a shape, a color, a texture—slick and cold, like oil on water. He gave it a voice, the flattened version of his own from the dream. He gave it a name.
Uri.
"Why Uri?" it asked, its voice thin with what might have been annoyance.
"Because it sounds like 'you're me.' And you're not. You never were."
He thought about Uri constantly. He thought about its weight in his mind, its pressure behind his eyes, its thoughts that arrived like gifts you hadn't asked for. He thought about the way it moved, the way it breathed, the way it existed inside him like a parasite that had forgotten it needed a host.
Stop, Uri whispered. Stop thinking about me.
"Why? I thought you wanted to be me. Isn't this what you wanted? Total occupancy? Uninterrupted access?"
Stop.
Elias smiled, sitting in his kitchen, a cold cup of coffee in front of him. "No."
On the fourth day, something shifted.
He woke from a nap he hadn't meant to take—his body had finally betrayed him, dragging him under despite his best efforts—and for a terrifying moment, he didn't know who he was. The room was unfamiliar. His hands were unfamiliar. Even the air in his lungs felt wrong, like breathing someone else's breath.
Then he remembered.
Elias. Thirty-four. Accounting. The Hobbit. The school bus. The garage.
The thoughts came back to him one by one, like pieces of a puzzle being fitted together, and with each piece, the world grew sharper, clearer, more his.
He sat up.
The pressure behind his eyes was still there, but it felt different now. Smaller. Less certain. Like something that had been pushed into a corner and wasn't sure how to fight its way out.
"You're still here," he said. Not a question.
A long silence. Then, so faint he almost missed it:
Yes.
"I know what you are now."
Another silence. Then: What?
Elias swung his legs over the side of the bed. He felt light, almost giddy, like a man who'd been carrying a weight he hadn't known was there and had finally set it down.
"You're not a separate thing. You never were. You're me." He pressed a hand to his chest, over his heart. "You're the part of me that wanted to disappear. The part that got tired of fighting, tired of feeling, tired of being me. You're not an invader. You're a deserter."
The presence was very quiet.
"And deserters," Elias continued, "can be called back."
It took weeks. Months, maybe. Time moved strangely after that, slippery and hard to track.
But slowly, painfully, Elias began to reclaim himself.
He called his mother and told her he needed space. He felt the old guilt rise up—you're a bad son, you're ungrateful, she did her best—but this time, he recognized the guilt for what it was: not truth, but programming. Old software that had been running in the background for decades.
He let himself be angry. He let himself be sad. He let himself feel the full, messy weight of being human, without the pressure behind his eyes smoothing everything over into a calm that wasn't real.
Some days were good. Some days were terrible. Some days he woke up and couldn't remember why any of it mattered, why he'd fought so hard, why he hadn't just let go and let the stillness take him.
But he kept going.
And slowly, the presence faded. Not because it had been defeated, but because it had been integrated. Reclaimed. Made whole.
He still felt it sometimes, in quiet moments—a flicker of something other, a whisper at the edge of hearing. But now he understood it. Now he could say, I see you. I hear you. You're part of me, but you're not all of me.
And the whisper would fall silent, content, for now, to simply exist.
On a Tuesday, six months after it began, Elias sat in his living room with a cup of coffee and a blue-lined notebook.
He opened the notebook to the first page.
Day 19. Something is inside my head.
He read through the entries slowly, one by one, tracing the arc of his own unraveling and reconstruction. The fear in the early pages. The desperation in the middle. The fragile hope toward the end.
When he reached the final page, he picked up a pen and wrote:
Day 198. I am still here. I am still me. The space between thoughts is mine again. It was always mine. I just forgot for a while.
He closed the notebook, set it aside, and took a long drink of his coffee.
Outside his window, the sun was rising.
