Please forgive me for how this is written.
I’ve stayed awake as long as I can, my eyes are so heavy. I’m just…so…so…tired.
I’m sorry mom. I should have listened to you.
My mom used to tell me about the thin places in this world. The places where the veil between here and there can slip, and show us flashes of what’s beyond. Or sometimes, things can sneak through. I guess her grasp on here, wherever “here” is, got a bit too thin, because Dad committed her to psychiatric care when I was eight. I never blamed him. When she started scratching out photos of herself, covering mirrors and turning her eyes away from her shadow, it was pretty clear that she needed help.
But it was help that she never got. She died a week later. “Natural causes” was on the death certificate, but now I’m sure there was nothing natural about it.
I can’t believe I got all the way to 21 before I thought any more about the thin places. Mom’s warnings and stories had faded into hazy memories. I was attempting to furnish my apartment about a month ago, trying to stretch my budget to make it feel a little more like a home. I’d found the perfect piece to add some luxury - an enormous antique mirror. It was a little cloudy, but the swirling details in a dull coppery metal around the rim added a sense of old world glamour to my apartment that I couldn’t normally afford. Mom would have hated it.
I hung it right next to my bed, wanting it to be somewhere I’d see it often. At first, it brought me so much joy. Until I heard the scratching. It didn’t strike me as odd, at first. I live in an old apartment, and mice in the walls wouldn’t be a huge surprise. But the traps I set didn’t seem to help. The scratching just got worse and worse, until I was finding it hard to sleep. That’s when some of mom’s old stories started to trickle back into my mind. “Be careful what memories of the world you bring into your life, old things can carry echoes of lives they once lived”. Ridiculous? Right?
But the scratching wouldn’t stop and I couldn’t get mom’s warning out of my head. Most nights I’d end up staring aimlessly at the ceiling, praying for sleep to take me. Until one night, right as I was about to drift off - teetering between asleep and awake, something caught my eye and I was yanked back awake. I could have sworn I saw a shadow of movement in the mirror. Naturally, I did what any sane person would do - moved the mirror to the floor in the hallway until I could get rid of it and threw an old sheet over the top. At last, the scratching stopped. I can’t tell you the relief of falling soundly asleep that night. But it wasn’t over.
The next night, I saw her. Saw me. I woke in the darkness to hear the sheet slithering off the mirror and looked over. My reflection stood there, perfectly still, watching me. It wasn’t possible, I was laying in bed bleary eyed, yet there she stood in the moonlit mirror, staring. I thought I was going to throw up from fear. I lay frozen and stared back. Eventually, I worked up the courage to launch a pillow at my bedroom door, slamming it shut, and waited petrified for morning light. As soon as the sun was up, it felt like a bad dream - like it wasn’t real. I took the mirror to the dump straight away, but I think in my heart I knew it was too late.
Now that the mirror’s gone, I see her everywhere. My shadow takes a moment too long to follow, my photos follow me with their eyes. My eyes. I know she’s there, watching and waiting.
Waiting for what? I don’t know.
I should have listened mom, I’m sorry. I got too close to the thin place, and now I can’t get out. I can feel that she’s waiting for me to sleep, to slip between the world’s of waking and slumber where the veil is thin. It’s been a few days now, and each time my head begins to nod and my eyes droop, I see the shadows start to creep from the walls and slither towards me and know she’s close.
I can’t do it anymore, I don’t know how to escape myself. I’m sorry mom, but I have to sleep,
She’s coming.