I had screamed for over an hour, I was scared. The fact is, it's impossible that I survived—I'm supposed to have died from hypothermia. And the person I saw before closing my eyes was indeed myself.
How should I react? Before waking up, I was dying, and another me appeared, covered in blood.
While I was thinking this in my head, I touched the lower part of my face and noticed a beard starting to grow.
"How long have I been here?"
That question scared me because I couldn't even remember the day I arrived here.
I lay down on the ground and decided to look at the ceiling.
Just rocks... only rocks. I saw nothing but rocks, no interior like I had been told.
Suddenly, whispers surged in my ears, coming from all four directions.
Their voices sounded both near and far. I couldn't understand what they were saying.
"RUN, HE'S COMING FOR YOU," they said.
Then I heard footsteps on the path ahead—it could only be one person, my blood-covered self.
I grabbed my bag and ran into the path on the left, imagining what my other self would do if he caught me. I ran with fear in my gut.
The inside of the tunnel was covered in fog, but what intrigued me the most
was that instead of rocks, I saw some kind of orbs with colors that changed depending on their position.
I was curious; the more I looked at them, the more intrigued I became.
"My little one, I'm coming to get you. You're going to join my collection of corpses," he shouted.
I started running faster, but the same phenomenon from the other tunnels repeated.
"You still don't get it? I thought you were smarter than this," he yelled, his voice getting closer.
"Explain yourself, genius. Anyway, you want to kill me, so explain," I said.
"AAAAH AAAH very well. Right now, we're inside your head, little rat," he shouted.
I stopped running and thought about the previous events—my sudden fatigue, my sudden pain, my death, and my return every time I woke up.
He could be right. Well, I thought he was half right because deep down I felt that I died from hypothermia, and my leg pains still persisted, and my fatigue was very real.
"What if…"
Then an idea that could explain what's happening to me popped into my head.
I got swept off my feet. Lying on the ground, I looked behind me—it was him; he had caught me.
"You little rat, making me walk through these damn tunnels. I'm not just going to 'sigh' kill you—sigh I'm going to tear you apart."
He was going through the same thing I was—only two hypotheses:
The first is that it's not me, but someone else, and for reasons beyond me, I see him with my body.
Or the second is that the person in front of me is indeed another me—or rather, another version of me.