Secret Letter

The fluorescent lights are too bright and they're humming secrets I can't quite catch. My feet are moving before my brain catches up—through the automatic doors, past the reception desk where the woman is staring (she knows something), into the parking lot where the air tastes like metal and fear.

I know this feeling. I've been here before.

Eight years old, post-surgery, when the world first cracked open and showed me its hidden machinery. The doctors said it was normal then—brain swelling, they called it. Temporary. But I remember the way the hospital walls breathed, how every sound carried messages meant only for me.

Now I'm twenty-six and running again.

The asphalt under my feet is too real, too solid. Each step sends shockwaves up my spine like I'm made of glass. Behind me, someone calls my name but it sounds distorted, stretched thin like taffy. I don't turn around because turning around means acknowledging that this is happening *to* me and not *around* me.

But I know. Somewhere in the rational corner of my mind that's still functioning, I know this is my brain misfiring. Neurons sparking in patterns they shouldn't. The same patterns from childhood, familiar as muscle memory.

A car horn blares and suddenly I'm hyperaware of everything: the smell of exhaust mixing with hospital disinfectant still clinging to my clothes, the way shadows fall wrong across the pavement, how every person walking past seems to move with purpose that excludes me but somehow still revolves around me. I'm the center of a conspiracy I don't understand.

It's happening in your brain,* I tell myself. *Just like before. You survived before.

But knowing doesn't make the parking lot stop spinning. Knowing doesn't make the voices from the hospital entrance sound any less urgent, any less like they're discussing my fate. Knowing doesn't stop my hands from shaking as I reach for my phone, forgetting for the third time that I left it inside, forgetting that inside is where the danger lives now, forgetting everything except the need to keep moving, keep running, keep the terrible knowing at bay.

I find myself crouched between two cars—a blue sedan and a red pickup truck. Red. Always red. The color screams warnings I can't decipher. When did I get here? The sun is setting or rising (time has become negotiable) and the sky looks wrong, too orange, like someone adjusted the saturation on reality.

My breathing comes in short gasps that fog up the car windows. Through the condensation, I can see figures moving in the hospital—nurses, doctors, maybe security. They're looking for me. Of course they're looking for me. I shouldn't have run but staying felt like drowning in fluorescent quicksand.

The child in me, the eight-year-old with fresh surgical scars and a skull full of swelling, whispers: *Remember the ceiling tiles? How they moved? Remember how Mom cried when you told her about the people in the walls?*

I remember. God, I remember everything now with painful clarity. The way reality had bent and twisted after the surgery, how for weeks I couldn't tell which sounds were real and which were my brain trying to make sense of its own chaos. The doctors said it would pass. And it did. Eventually.

Eventually.

My phone. I need my phone. But my phone is inside and inside is where Dr. Peterson's voice got too loud, where the fluorescent lights started their humming, where I looked at my hands and didn't recognize them as mine. Inside is where this started three hours ago (was it three hours?) when I walked in for a routine follow-up and walked out running.

A security guard appears at the hospital entrance, scanning the parking lot. His radio crackles with static that sounds like whispers. I press myself lower between the cars, feeling the asphalt's roughness through my jeans. Everything is texture now—too much texture. The fabric of my shirt feels like sandpaper, the air tastes metallic, and somewhere in the distance a lawn mower sounds like artillery fire.

I need to call someone. Mom. My sister. Anyone who knows about before, who understands that this isn't weakness or failure or broken—it's just my brain remembering an old song it learned in childhood.

But to call someone, I need to go back inside.

The thought makes my stomach lurch. Inside is where normal people exist in normal light having normal conversations. Inside is where I'll have to explain why I ran, why I'm crouched in a parking lot talking to myself, why my reality doesn't match anyone else's.

The security guard starts walking toward the parking lot. His footsteps echo off concrete in a rhythm that spells out my name. I close my eyes and count backwards from ten, a technique from childhood therapy.

Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven.

You know what this is.

Six. Five. Four.

You've survived this before.

Three. Two.

Your brain is lying to you, but it's still your brain.

One.

I open my eyes. The security guard is closer now, but the whispers have quieted. The fluorescent humming has faded to background noise. I'm still crouched between cars in a hospital parking lot, still scared, still confused, but the knowing is stronger now than the terror.

I stand up slowly, my legs unsteady. The guard sees me and approaches cautiously, his hand near his radio but not threatening. He's older, maybe a grandfather, and his eyes are kind.

"You okay, miss?"

The question hangs in the air between us. Am I okay? Define okay. My brain is misfiring in familiar patterns. I'm experiencing the same neurological chaos that nearly broke me as a child. The world still looks wrong, sounds wrong, feels wrong. But I'm standing. I'm breathing. I know where I am and who I am, even if I can't quite trust either.

"I need to go back inside," I hear myself say. "I left my phone."

The security guard nods like this makes perfect sense, like people run into parking lots and hide between cars all the time. Maybe in a hospital, they do.

"I'll walk with you," he says.