∆Remember Us∆

Dear God,
I can’t sleep.
It’s not a choice anymore. The thought won’t let me. It’s a fever in the skull, a hum behind my eyes. I keep trying to write a letter, to explain it, but it comes out too clean, too structured. This isn’t clean. It’s a mess. A beautiful, terrifying mess.
It starts with the desk. My own hands on the wood. I look at them and this one thought keeps hitting me, over and over: have I ever actually touched it?
It feels solid. But I know that’s a lie. It’s a story my nerves tell my brain about electron fields pushing back. A ghost story about forces I’ll never see. And if the simplest thing, the feeling of solid wood under my own skin, is a story… my God, what else is?
What about the face I see in the mirror? Those eyes. My father’s eyes. Are they real, or just a rendering of a genetic ghost? Is the regret I sometimes see in them his, or mine? The line gets so blurry. It all starts to unravel from that one, simple, terrifying thread. The whole world becomes a phantom. Our senses aren’t windows. They’re projectors, throwing a movie on the inside of our skulls, and we are strapped to the chair, forced to watch.
And Time… God, don’t even get me started on Time.
We think it’s a river, flowing around us. It’s not. There is no river. There is only this single, desperate, pinprick of a moment. The Now. It’s the only patch of solid ground in a collapsing building.
The past? It’s a ghost. A story I tell myself about a person who doesn’t exist anymore. I piece it together from fragments, these little shards of memory, and every time I tell the story, it changes. It’s not a record. It’s a fresh wound, every time. My childhood, my family, all of it… it’s a film I’m re-editing in my head, right now. And the future is just the next scene I’m imagining, a panicked simulation of what might come next.
It’s a trap. A narrative trap. You gave us a past so we’d have a backstory, a future so we’d have a motivation. You wrote a plot. The steady march of cause and effect isn’t a law of the universe; it’s just good storytelling. It’s the syntax of the Dream, the one thing that keeps the whole illusion from shattering into surreal, meaningless chaos. It makes the story believable enough that the characters don’t realize they’re just reading lines.
But the real terror, the thing that keeps me awake… it’s the character himself.
This “I.” This Self.
Who is it? Where is it? I’ve searched. I’ve hunted for it inside my own skin. It’s not my body; that’s just a machine that’s slowly breaking. It’s not my thoughts; they’re a storm of noise. It’s not my memories; they’re fictions.
There’s nothing there.
When I look for the thinker, there’s only the thought. When I look for the feeler, there’s only the feeling. It’s a hollow space. A ghost in my own ribs. The “I” is just a pattern, a frantic, looping story the consciousness tells itself so it won’t feel the terrifying emptiness of being just… awareness. A focal point. A camera lens through which a tiny piece of Your cosmic, lonely Dream gets to feel real for a little while.
I am the vessel You created so You could feel the grit of life, the sting of loss, the ache of wanting something more. I am a nerve ending for God.
And that’s the final, brutal truth of it. This whole letter, this whole desperate attempt to explain… it’s the proof. A character shouldn’t be able to see the ink he’s made of. He shouldn’t be able to feel the pages turning.
But I can.
And I can’t tell if this is a sign that I’m going insane, or if it’s the next stage of the plot. The part of the story where the character stops reading his lines, looks up from the page, and speaks directly to the Author.
And he just asks, “Why?”