1. Every morning that October I found my name written in the condensation on my bathroom mirror. Neat letters, like a careful hand. I lived alone. I checked the locks every night. I stopped sleeping and started snapping at everyone at work, convinced something was very wrong with either my apartment or my mind, and not sure which outcome frightened me more. I didn’t tell anyone because I’d learned, over years, that telling people things like this made them look at you a certain way.
My colleague James noticed before I said a word. Not the mirror — he noticed me. He noticed I was flinching at sounds and forgetting sentences mid-thought, and instead of mentioning it in a way that would embarrass me, he quietly switched his lunch break to match mine and just started sitting with me.
He brought good coffee and asked nothing. One afternoon I told him everything. He listened without the look I’d been afraid of. He came with me to the doctor. The diagnosis was sleepwriting — stress-induced somnambulism. I’d been writing my own name in my sleep, my brain’s exhausted way of staying tethered to itself. James sat in the waiting room the whole appointment. When I came out he handed me a coffee and said, well, at least you have good handwriting. I hadn’t laughed in weeks. It felt like setting something down.
2. I was twenty-two, alone on a late-night train, the car nearly empty, when a man moved from his seat across the car to sit directly behind me. I could hear him breathing. He leaned forward and began speaking low near my ear. My stop was still four away. I stared at the black window, body rigid. A large man in work clothes, clearly just off a night shift, looked up from three rows down, stood without hurrying, and moved to sit beside me. He pulled out his phone and showed me a photo of his granddaughter, speaking at normal volume, filling the space between me and the man behind us with something warm and ordinary. The man behind us moved back to his original seat and got off at the next stop. My seatmate rode with me all the way to mine.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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