So there I was, sitting in bed. I couldn’t sleep nor stay too awake, so I opened up my laptop and started reading some old stories to help me ease to sleep. The dim light from the screen was the only one lighting up my room, spare the warm glow from under my door.
I have the tendency to do this often. As an aspiring writer it helps me calm my head but also entangle me in the mysterious world I’m being dragged through, I’m sure you relate being here. It often gives me inspiration to create my own fantastical imaginations and put them into mystical words. So after about a thirty minute read through of some of the like, I wanted to write my own.
I began clacking away at my keyboard, echoing through the dimly lit room like a buzzing bug in my ear. It was so loud in the silence, but not enough to break my concentration. The other noise, however, did so.
It was the high-pitch creak of a door. The screech of hinges sliding against each other to let something passed. My eyes immediately gazed up into the silent blackness to see that my closet door was slightly ajar. It was a faint difference, so subtle one would usually skip by it and assume it to be the A/C blowing it aside. Precisely just as I did, and moved my attention toward the screen in front of me.
I clicked and clacked away, almost enough to drown out the same creaking I had just heard before. Now annoyed, I peeked up at the door once again. This time, there was a shaky hand resting gently around its edge. The fingers were long and frail with a stained yellow nail. It was pale, but that’s all I could make out in the colorless gray of my room. My tone went from irritation to more curious, as it was quite the odd thing, you see.
It gave me the idea of another story, so I saved what I had and opened another draft for my new, more exciting story. It would be about a man, yes, a man in someone’s closet. So I clacked my keys away.
As I did so, I noticed once more the same sound piercing the silence, the door was opened even further! I gazed up from my obituary to see a peculiar looking face staring right back at me.
He had patchy, very greasy, wavy hair. It was long and a solid black against his bone white skin. He was staggeringly thin, like a prisoner who’d been tortured for information. He carried a slight frown, showing a couple rotten front teeth. His eyes were wide, but weak. They were, or appeared in the dark, to have solid back irises. I now had a description for the man in the story!
So I began to click, and I began to clack. Clickity clacking away at the plastic letters that wrote of a man in the closet.
“Hey,”
I looked back up at the half opened door that held a figure. He stood tall, but hunched to around my height. His bones stretched against his skin like a tight fitted suit. He seemed to almost glow in the cold abyss that was behind him. Now I was all but infatuated with the silhouette of an angel that could come to save a wretched soul! He would seem so frightening to the eye, but he was only here to help.
So click clack clickity clack goes the old keyboard. But alas, he had something to say.
“Hey,”
But louder this time, or closer?
I looked once again at the door wide open, the man standing now straight up, but with a grin. His breath was heavy, and his eyes wider. I started getting the idea that something wasn’t right. I heard a creak, but now from my bedroom door.
My eyes looked over to see two shadows underneath the glow from outside. I lived alone, so nobody should be out there.
“Hey,” came from outside in the same stranger’s raspy voice.
I looked back over at the void where he stood. There was nothing. A cold dark air in his wake. It was an agonizing stillness. Thoughts rampaged through my head, now my creative mind flourished but only of my painful demise.
What will he do? Oh god there’s a stranger in my room. What the hell even is he? Is he a he? An it? A thing?
“Hey,” whispered in my ear.
My head shot over to see nothing. It was just the same void of darkness that loomed throughout my whole room. The shadows from the empty closet encompassed my world.
Where the hell is he it ?? ? Why can’t I see? Where am I? “Hey,”
It is in my thoughts. Was it all along? Was it all in my head? My door is open, though. That’s not in my head.
“Hey,” “Hey,” “Hey,”
I could see its face in the dark, clouded by the misty silence. It was a shifting shape, a tinge of grey dancing in black. I looked back at the screen to see a message left to me.
“Hey,” three months ago, the notification just showing up.
I looked to see who sent it, it him. Left on read. But he is no longer with us. His mom found him in the closet there, dangling. I miss him still, and his eyes are still glowing in the cold, black shadows of that damned closet. He’s still haunting me, I shouldn’t have ghosted him like that, but I didn’t get the notification until just now. I’m sorry. Please just let me write. Just let me post it and let me be. I didn’t mean to, I loved you. I still love you.