You were never asleep

The clock in the hallway ticked like a nervous heartbeat, always one second too late. Rhea stared at it from the couch, arms coiled around her knees, swaddled in her boyfriend’s hoodie. It still smelled like him. But he hadn’t come home.

Not since the night she watched him sleep — and he opened his eyes without a blink.

“You were never asleep,” she whispered to the walls. Her voice echoed too many times for a small apartment.

She had filmed it. Three nights ago, unable to shake the sense of wrongness in him — the way he watched her when he thought she wasn’t looking. She waited until he was in bed, then propped her phone on the dresser, camera aimed at him.

The footage was worse than she’d imagined.

For six hours, he lay stiffly on his side, facing her, unblinking. Smiling. Never once closing his eyes.

When she confronted him in the morning, he’d laughed. “I’m a light sleeper,” he said. “You're being paranoid, babe.”

But she knew that wasn’t sleep. She knew that wasn’t him.

The next night, he disappeared.

---

She hadn’t left the apartment in seventy hours. Every knock made her flinch. Every creak in the walls felt rehearsed, as if the apartment itself was playing a script written just for her. Someone — or something — had replaced him. Had worn his voice, his walk, the shape of his hands. But they forgot the little things.

He blinked too little.

He knew things she hadn’t told him.

He hummed songs she dreamed about.

Her therapist said the mind could fracture under stress, that trauma claws into the subconscious and creates shadows that look like people.

But the shadow in her home wasn’t a hallucination. It left footprints in flour she spilled on the floor.

It moved her mirrors.

It scratched a message on the bathroom wall, carved into steam:

“You were never asleep."

---

Rhea sat on the edge of the bed, the phone trembling in her hand. Her messages remained unread. No one picked up her calls. She no longer trusted her own voice. Sometimes, it didn’t sound like hers.

A static hum began filling her ears each time she tried to remember how the night started — the one where she filmed him. Time stuttered, glitched, reversed. In one memory, she was filming him. In another, he was filming her.

Which came first?

Was it her idea to record him, or did he suggest it?

She scrubbed through the video again, frame by frame.

There. One blink.

She froze. Rewound.

It wasn’t him blinking. It was her. A faint reflection caught in the mirror across the room — eyes wide and twitching in her sleep, mouth silently repeating something over and over.

Zoom. Enhance.

Her lips moved: “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.”

---

She destroyed the phone with a hammer.

---

The apartment no longer obeyed her. She turned off lights only to find them glowing minutes later. Music played without a source. Her own voice whispered from the kitchen at night.

When she looked into the mirror now, her reflection blinked out of sync.

Her boyfriend was still gone. But his toothbrush was wet each morning.

She tried to leave.

The elevator doors never opened.

The stairwell led only to the hallway outside her door.

The neighbor — an old woman with cataract eyes — offered her stale cookies and said, “You poor dear. They never let the dreaming ones go.”

Rhea vomited in the sink.

---

She found the truth in the lining of the couch.

A torn seam. A folded paper. Handwriting she didn’t recognize, yet somehow did.

“You were never asleep. Stop looking for him. You’re wearing him now.”

---

She clawed at her skin that night, frantically searching for seams, for zippers, for proof. Nothing.

But in the mirror, she saw his shoulders. His walk. His smile. His way of tilting his head when confused.

It wasn’t a shadow wearing him.

It was her.

Or the part of her that wanted to be loved, no matter what she had to erase to have it.

---

There had been a fight. She remembered, suddenly. Screaming. Shouting. A candle knocked over. A mirror cracked.

She remembered killing him.

But not in hate. Not in rage.

In fear.

Because he kept saying the same sentence every time she tried to leave:

“You were never asleep. You were never asleep. You were never asleep.”

---

She buried him in the walls. She painted over his eyes. She slept inside his clothes.

Then, one morning, she woke up and didn’t remember doing any of it.

Because the part of her that screamed, that mourned, that shattered — she put that to sleep.

And someone else — something quieter, something that loved more neatly — took her place.

---

Tonight, she sat at the edge of the bed again.

The door creaked open behind her.

She didn’t look. She didn’t need to.

She knew he had returned. Or maybe he’d never left.

A voice, just behind her ear, whispering:

“I forgive you.”

She wept. Quietly. Because the voice was warm, kind — and exactly like hers.

She turned around and saw herself.

Not in a mirror.

But standing there. Watching. Smiling.

And then the other her whispered:

“You were never asleep. I was.”

---

Rhea — the Rhea who still remembered pain — closed her eyes.

The other one sat beside her. Took her hand.

And slowly, gently, pulled the grief out of her chest like a tangled vine, feeding it to the cracks in the walls.

For the first time in weeks, Rhea slept.

Really slept.

And in the silence, the new Rhea stayed awake.

To keep the memory buried.

To keep the love alive.

To never, ever blink again.

---

A little note for the curious ~
This story explores the fractured horror of self-erasure — the things we kill within ourselves to be loved, and the versions of us that stay behind to survive. If this spoke to you, share it. Comment. Subscribe. And remember: sometimes, what you forget... remembers you.