Secret Letter

The sun hadn't even begun to rise when I first came to in that hospital. Screaming, flailing, and deep underneath all of that, truthfully, crying. I was crying. Nobody could see me struggling, nobody more than my mother. Who had angrily taken me to the Emergency Room earlier that night and earlier that week because I first thought I was having a stroke, but it turned out to be a dangerously long panic attack.

If you've never been in one, you'd never know how tight or how loud an MRI machine can get. I'm properly diagnosed, or I was up until this faithful moment inside the Emergency Room basement, next to the morgue. The first time I had really come to, because up until that point, I had been in and out of sleep. I was lying in one, screaming and laughing maniacally.

Naturally, I sat there deep, inside my body, watching as I thrashed about uncarefully on the table. The woman, a nurse, gentle and fair, had picked up my lifeless body from the bed onto the table just a few minutes before and was taken aback by the sudden outpour of movement as I grappled with the tight space for a moment.

A far and abstract memory now, but at the time when all of this was going on, it was frightful and curious.

But you're not here to read a forgotten night that I'm hurting myself trying to write down so far into the present, so healed from that moment, you want to know how I got to that most intimate moment in the night when, with tears finally streaming down my face, I screamed "I am LOKI!" deep in my waking surface:

The night started like any other boring night. I ended my day around 9:30 and was lying in bed, doomscrolling through TikTok by 10:00. I was out like a light by midnight, and awake again by 12:30. But something felt off when I woke up that early morning, and then it all hit me and I was shoved into what I could only call now as Tunnelverse. It wasn't, however, Tunnelverse. It was something different. A commodity that was kind and scary about it.

When I woke up that morning, thirty minutes deep into sleep, I had felt a cold absence in the bed next to me. I hadn't noticed anything different, except that, on my seemingly empty bedroom wall, across from the bed, sat a cast-iron plaque that read:

NO WITCHCRAFT IN HELL

I hadn't thought much of it; I just knew it wasn't real. I had seen this same wall, still and unchanging. I continued to think as I climbed out of bed. What a mistake that had been, I remember sitting back down in the bed. Then I rose to my feet again and turned to look at the bed. In the bed, lying there where I had been lying was me. Asleep and still. It bothered me a little to see myself, but I knew for a moment anyway that I had been asleep. But something about this started to make me panic and then I heard it, aching gently behind my ear like it had done every time I was having a panic attack. A soft buzzing and then...

I was standing at the foot of my bed.

Watching, observing, as I stand over my body, screaming for mom because I was having a seizure. All of it, feeling surreal as I turned away and watched myself walk toward my bedroom door to get her as I turned away and started walking to the bedroom door to get her.

All while an ache bellowed in my chest.