Okay Reddit, I woke up yesterday morning and there was a red rose on the pillow beside me, it was tied to a flash stick, and when I read what was on it it freaked me the hell out. At first I thought it was just some creepo who'd been following me, but then- Look when you read it you'll know what I'm talking about.
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Amara, I know what this is going to sound like, but I need you to believe me. I need you to understand. You thought you got knocked up from a one-night stand. You thought you never even knew my name, but what about the photos? You know the ones, of you in that really formal red dress, with the veil and the bouquet that you had taken for the pure whimsy of it? Why are you always standing to the side of the shot, and what about all your friends? Your sister, Aimee? The men in the pictures weren't models, they were my friends, my family. My brother, Simon. The guy with the beard who's locking elbows with you, you're barely suppressing a giggle? That was my Father. I think. Do you remember? Look at the big photo over by the TV, Amara. Really concentrate. I'm there, I'm standing right beside you, and I'm smiling so hard to keep from crying because I'm so happy.
That was our wedding day, Amara. I know you don't remember, and I know you've edited everything so it makes sense, because there's a hole in your life isn't there? A hole that you can't explain. Like why you woke up one day, eight months pregnant and you couldn't remember how or why, or all the extra clothes in your closet, like the cherries in the fruit bowl that you would never buy because they make you sick. These are all things that any interested stranger could discover easily enough, I know, but I know things that you've never told another soul, Amara.
Except me.
That faint scar on your left shoulder? The one you tell everyone that you got in a bicycle accident? It was a tattoo you had removed. Freshman year in college you fell for the wrong guy. Whirlwind romance that turned into a typhoon of abuse. Your words. You moved back home that summer, after you had his name scoured off your body.
I know you always put an extra spoon of sugar in your coffee, and you're completely shameless about the number of biscuits you have with it. You say your favourite movie of all time is 'Labyrinth', but it's not, it's actually Goldeneye, because you love schlocky action movies, just like me. You told me that you grew up watching them with your Father. It was how you connected. Your favourite colour is green, but you never wear it because you say it doesn't suit you. That's why you buy green socks and green underwear.
I know that the first boy you kissed tried to take things too far too fast at a school dance, and you had to knee him in the crotch. He nearly got you expelled. That's the reason why you started doing Judo. I know you'll never pay to see a movie until you've downloaded a bootleg copy and verified that it's worth your money. I know about the stash of chocolates you keep on the top shelf of the pantry behind all the paper towels and tissue boxes.
I also know the answers to some questions that have been bugging you for months.
I know why you have two cars in your driveway when you live alone. I know why you have a carved wooden rocking horse in your garage, half-finished but you've never so much as held a hammer. I know about all the men's clothes that are in one half of your bedroom closet when you live alone. I know why you changed your surname seemingly at random 18 months ago.
I also know why you named your son Lucas.
Because that's my name. Just like the clothes are mine, and the rocking horse, and the car.
Still don't believe me? In a box in the attic, just to the right of the manhole as you go on up there will be some old clothes. My old JROTC stuff is on the top, there'll be a nametag on the front of my dress jacket: 'O'Dell', and there'll be an iron-on label below the collar on the inside: 'Lucas O'Dell'. There's a photo album too, they should all be pictures of me. But you'll only see empty fields, parade grounds full of boys marching in formation, and a back yard to a house you don't even know. Look for the empty spaces in those formations, look for the blank emptiness in each of those photos and concentrate Amara. I'm there. I'm still here.
I'm still alive. But I don't know for how much longer.
I said before about the man with the beard in the wedding photos? You probably don't even see him either. It took me weeks of trying but eventually I could make him out. I think he's my father. But all I remember of him now is what I see in those photos. You see Amara, there's something going wrong. I'm not the first person this has happened to, and I won't be the last. People are disappearing. Not straight away and not all at once. We're fading away. Like afterimages, and the lives of everyone we ever knew are stitched over like a patchwork. It's not like we never existed, but people can't remember us. It's a plague, and it's sweeping the globe, but nobody even knows it's happening. I think it's even happened before, but I can't be sure, it's so easy to explain away.
A house lies empty because an entire family fades away so the neighbours say: 'Oh they just up and left.' A business closes because one day the last employee just fades to nothingness and people say: 'Oh I guess that store closed down.' An entire industry leaves America's industrial heartland. Entire neighbourhoods lie empty and what did we call it Amara? The Global Financial Crisis.
I have travelled the globe, Amara. Stowed away on planes because nobody can see me and I have been to places like Battleship Island off the coast of Japan, The Kola peninsula in Russia. Liverpool, Manchester, London, Cardiff, Glasgow. Easter Island, Machu Pichu, the Marquesas. The suburbs of Detroit, of Rochester. After a while you start to notice things. The people who stayed, people who lived there, who left, the survivors. They can't remember things, things that you'd think would be important. The names of former co-workers, faces in family photos, the name of the corner store, or any number of people they might have interacted with on a daily basis for years. They're survivors of a horrifying disease and they don't even know it.
Don't believe me? Go to the county records office and look up the figures from the last city council election. The population given for the county electoral roll is 303,429. Now where are all those people, Amara? Why is the mall so empty? You might think it's just the drought, driving people away, but I want you to look at the families next time you're out. The number of single fathers who have to take time out of work to pick up their kids from school or band practice when they work shifts down at the lumber mill, the train yards, or the brick works. The number of single women, just like you: pregnant with absent partners. Men they can't remember, the assumption of wild nights they never had. Ask around town and you'll discover there's a distressingly large amount of orphans who grew up on their own in homes large enough for five and six people.
Then there's the empty houses, one here, one there. Not a lot of people have noticed yet. But there's a house up on Pinecrest Road where the lights haven't gone on in over a year, but there's an eight-seat dinner table set for one, and children's drawings all over the refrigerator. Whoever it was? Never even locked the door before they disappeared. Then there's the place three doors down from you, with the rear porch light that's been on for three weeks? What's the name of the family that lived there? I'll give you a hint: Check the mailbox next time you go for your morning run. Given the kind of mail in the mailbox, at least three generations were living in that house together.
I should start at the beginning though. I should tell you the signs and the symptoms so maybe you can pick up on them and do something about it before it's too late. Maybe you can find someone who'll believe you.
At first people won't see you. Occasionally you'll bump shoulders with someone in the supermarket before they'll see you: no big deal, you'll apologise and move on. At first it'll be total strangers, then it'll start happening with co-workers and acquaintances. You'll walk into a room and people will get startled by you, they'll take a few seconds to register you're there. Then people start to forget details about you, the less well they know you, the easier it'll be. Your boss forgets that you asked for Friday off for your Wife's ultrasound. The Church Pastor asks if you're knew to the congregation even though you've been going there since you moved into town five years ago. Your shift supervisor forgets your name. Things like that. You write it off at first, I know I did. But then it starts to get to you. At first it's just mildly annoying, but then it starts to become personal, when you've known your shift-supervisor for three years and he can't remember your name anymore and starts calling someone in to cover the empty spot on the crew, only remembering you exist when he sees your face.
I remember things you don't remember, Amara. The day I got fired because even if everyone at work could see me, they didn't remember who I was or why I was in the locker room. That was when we went to the doctors. But of course they couldn't find anything, you thought maybe I was going crazy, that I'd driven to the wrong lumber mill, the doctors suggested brain tumour, but they found nothing. I remember the day my friends stopped recognising me, My family. When we called home for thanksgiving and my mother dropped the mashed potatoes on the floor when I walked into the kitchen. How it took her 10 minutes of staring at the family photo from our wedding for her to recognise me, how we had to explain over and over and over how she knew you through me for it to register. You're lucky, Amara. You never woke up the next morning and got beaten up by your own brother because he thought you were a burglar, because he'd forgotten everything about you. Because he'd forgotten you were twins.
You made some excuses. Said I was your new boyfriend and I'd arrived late the night before. Then you asked him to tell me all about how my family knew you, why you were so close, and my mother and brother and sisters spent the next 40 minutes contradicting each other with their own version of filling in the blanks in their memories. You were Ashley's friend from school even though you'd grown up in a town a hundred miles away. You were fostered by my mother even though your parents were affluent, alive and provided you with a perfectly decent childhood, you were Simon's old college girlfriend even though you'd never met him until two years ago. They never questioned any of it, every misremembered fact that spilled forth was added to the patchwork that was blocking me out of their lives. I was shattered. I don't know if my father was there. But I do remember I never recognised him in the wedding photo on the wall.
On the drive home I cried the hardest I'd ever cried since I was a kid. Bawled my eyes out and fell into a heap. You tried your best to console me and promised that you'd never forget me, You put my hands on your swelling stomach and told me that no matter what, you couldn't forget that I was a part of you, because we were building a future together, just like we'd always talked about. I wanted so much to believe you were telling the truth, but I knew it was just a matter of time. Just like you knew, but you didn't want to say it aloud for fear it causing it to happen.
Two weeks later you woke up one morning and screamed when you saw me. You freaked out and ran into the bathroom, you called the cops. I spent the next five minutes telling you every secret I knew about you, even the more intimate ones I'd never dare put on the internet. I'd finally had you convinced, and when the police arrived you told me you were going to tell them the whole story, you were going to make them listen, and we were going to figure something out. But when you opened the door and the officers stepped in, they walked right past me, they asked you where the intruder was, if you were still alright.
They hadn't seen me at all.
The last day you ever remembered me we went out to the place we had our first date, That little Vietnamese place on High street, and we wandered down by the river and I proposed all over again at the same place by the drinking fountain next to the skate park. You remembered every word I'd said the first time, and quoted my bad poetry back to me in perfect synchronisation. For a moment I believed that maybe I would be alright, that I could get better, and that I'd wake up in the morning and you wouldn't freak out again. But every time I let your hand go you'd grow hazy. I had to hold onto you just to stay connected, to stay real to you.
That was the last night I spent in our home, and even if you don't believe me yet I'm going to tell you how your, how our son, got his name. I waited for you to drift off and I packed a bag, my work backpack, something you'd never miss. I put a little food in there, and put on my best hiking boots, then I took a marker from my workshop and wrote three words on your pregnant belly. You never told anyone else what you saw that morning when you woke up Amara, but I know what it said, because the words were mine. You saw three words, and I guess in your confusion you mistook it for something supernatural, understandable, but I was hoping you wouldn't be able to explain it away, but those three words made you decide to name our Son after his father.
"Lucas loves you."
I was standing in the doorway, but you never saw me. When you started to cry I screamed your name in anguish and you never heard me. I took your hands in mine but you never even felt me. I slapped your face, but it was as though I'd never even so much as touched you. You were my last connection to the world, Amara, and you were my strongest, and if it's too late for me, I don't want this to happen to you, too.
I don't know what's going to happen to me Amara, but I don't have much time left. I don't even have a reflection anymore, and I'm starting to feel the sunlight pass through me. You need to get out of Town. The plague is getting worse, and I don't know how or why it spreads, I just know you've been lucky so far. You see, I wasn't just wandering the globe for the past two months without a purpose. There are places that seem to be immune to this plague, at least for now. I've left you maps and copious amounts of notes, Amara. Study them, learn to recognise the signs, and emigrate to one of the safe spots I've marked out for you. Hawaii, is your best bet for now. Scandinavia, The South Pacific, The Canary Islands, These are all places you should be looking to emigrate to. Please believe what I am trying to tell you Amara, for the sake of our Son take this all to heart, take it to heart and run as far and fast as you can. Just promise me you'll tell him that he was named after his father, and that he never, ever wanted to leave.
– Lucas
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Look. I was pretty sceptical until I read the part about him writing on my belly. I'm crying here, Reddit, I never told anyone about it. I washed it off in the shower that morning, and that evening I went into labour, there wasn't time to tell anyone before, and afterwards I didn't see the point. But here's the thing. The photos of me in the dress? I know some of the people. Simon O'Dell? I remember him. I remember him telling me about how his twin brother was born dead but he also said he was always upset that he never got to sleep in the top bunk. But if he was the only boy in the family why was he on the bottom bunk? And what about my name? My maiden name is Craigen, but even my driver's license says O'Dell. And, the photo by the TV, If I concentrate really hard then I can see something, it's like there's a grey smudge standing next to me. I can almost make out a hand in mine, but that's it. I'm scared, guys. Not that it's true, I'm living a nightmare, but I can't doubt it anymore. What if I've already caught this plague and haven't noticed? What if it's too late? What happens to my son? He's just a baby. How do I just pick up my life and run from something I can't even see and will never see coming? I need to run but I'm too scared to move. I can't tell my family, they won't believe me, they don't even want to talk to me at the moment, because my sister's husband disappeared three weeks ago and now her memory says that I cheated with the man she can't remember and that's why Lucas left me.
But Lucas never left me. Lucas held on so tight.
Submitted January 22, 2015 at 08:38PM by Baenlynn http://ift.tt/1EwhTcP nosleep
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