You wake to a sound.
First it's the refrigerator's low hum, Then the window's breath, blowing through the curtains .. The city turning over in its sleep came next. Then it sharpens into something focused—one steady, insistent pulse that climbs your spine and sits behind your teeth, like a word waiting to be spoken.
You lie still.
While your apartment listens with you.
The air smells like metal and rain through the windows. A storm prowls somewhere far off; somehow, you can taste the static of lightning before the it cracks through the waiting sky. Your skin smells different,—cleaner? Like the hospital and something else, something colder now flows beneath it. Looking at your hands, you think: foreign... how could this be mine….. but as you look through the shine of the moon that cuts through the night clouds, its clear to you, you are… no. You have changed, somehow. Choosing the exchange your bed for the bathroom. You stand bare, in front of the mirror …
For a heartbeat your pupils catch a ring of pale silver, then it's gone, wiping itself away like a secret you weren't meant to hear. You touch your face, your throat, the soft place below your jaw where a pulse announces itself like a knock. The rhythm there matches the one you woke to, and under it—quieter, lower—you feel another cadence answer. It's not in your body. It's not in the room. It's through the room, the way a distant train remakes the air in a house whose windows never open.
"Stop," you say, because this is what you do when a thing pretends it isn't visiting. Your breath fogs the mirror. The fog blooms and for a second the glass holds not your reflection but a shadow of a taller frame, the line of a shoulder, a suggestion of rain. The fog thins and it's only you again, eyes a little too bright for the morning. Your hands shake and then behave.
After your much needed shower, you ritually dress for the day. Office attire, your long wavy hair, tied back neatly into a midrise ponytail.
You make the coffee you don't want and drink it, because..... It's ritual. It is what you do every morning. Today, It tastes wrong—flat at the front, acid at the back, an aftertaste that reminds you of coins on the back of your tongue. When you swallow, the swallow feels… observed, causious. You set the mug down, as you always do, but this time, the ceramic clinks louder than you have ever noticed.
You tell yourself you're imagining things.. On the walk from your door the hallway lights stutters. The elevator hums a note lower than yesterday. Someone's perfume lingers in lobby furniture, your senses pick up notes of cedar, sandalwood and coconut.. and something else…. Something deeper… beneath the perfume. And you realize,
You do not want to go outside. Not yet. The idea of the sky feels like too much responsibility. The city sounds, overwhelming.
Back at the window, you stand very still and listen to the quiet decide whether to stay. It stays. The silver thread that haunted the night is invisible now, but the emptiness where it should be hums like a missing limb. The longer you look, the more your body believes. Believes that it is meant to lead you…. Somewhere. Whether your eyes consent or not, your heart is giving in.
It comes on too quickly to stop—a rush of pictures, images, memories ? you don't own: a glass tower washed clean by rain; a dark office that smells cold; a man who has been teaching his own hands, not to make fists for years. The vision holds you at the edge of him. You don't move. He doesn't either. You feel the drag of his self-control, like a current and you want to lean into it, until it stops pretending.
A sound. Not yours. The close scrape of breath. A word too soft to be meant for anyone and still meant just for you: enough.
You blink and your body returns in increments—fingertips, sternum, mouth. A warmth slides from your nose. You touch it…. Blood?, yes, but not the crisp red you know. It's deeper, duskier, and when the light catches it, a thin edge gleams, not like glitter but like the inside of a halved coin.
You don't panic. It's almost impressive that you don't. You tip your head forward, pinch the bridge of your nose, breathe through your mouth and count the way you were taught as a child to outwait riptides and bad news.
The bleeding slows. Stops. You make you way to the Lobby restroom, and When you wipe your hand the stain leaves a faint, metallic scent on your skin that refuses to be purely human.
You rinse. The water runs pink then blushes into clear. The mirror watches without comment.
"You're not losing your mind," you tell the room, softly. "You're being rewritten."
Subconsciously, you make your way back to ur apartment.
Laying on the sofa and u feel it, sleep comes back mid-afternoon, it brings the temperature of a chapel. You slip under and wake in someone else's perspective—his, you know it the way you know your name when no one uses it. You see your city from higher than it has any right to be. You feel rain thread the line of your collarbone as if your skin has known this angle all its life. You lift your hand—his hand—and the view in the glass becomes a mirror of your window at home.
The tether snaps bright. It isn't a snap that breaks; it's the kind that makes a banner crack in wind. Light moves through your body where veins move through a map.
You wake with your palm pressed flat to your own mirror, breath fogged on the glass, a word on your tongue that you haven't said out loud yet, because saying it would count.
You say it anyway, between your teeth. "Atlas."
The pulse inside the walls answers once. Then twice.
Then fades.