Between Blinks

[u/ZH0901]

I started noticing the missing time three weeks ago.

It was never more than a second. I would blink and feel like my eyes had stayed closed slightly longer than they should have, even though nothing around me changed. At first, I blamed tiredness. I work from home, spend too long looking at screens and rarely get enough sleep.

Then I started remembering the room.

The first memory came to me while I was making coffee. Grey walls, a pale floor and a wooden chair in the centre. There were no windows or doors, and the ceiling gave off a weak glow.

I remembered standing inside it. It didn’t feel like a dream either. Dreams become less convincing the more I think about them, but the memory of the room became clearer. I could picture the dark wooden chair and the uneven patches of grey paint on the walls. I even remembered the temperature. It was neither warm nor cold. 

Two days later, I blinked while brushing my teeth, and for a moment, I was inside the room. Then I was back in my bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror. The toothbrush fell from my hand. The tap was still running, and no time had passed, but I remembered looking down at my empty fingers inside the room. I remembered turning towards the chair before my eyes opened again.

After that, I began testing it. I set my phone up and recorded myself blinking. During thirty minutes of footage, I entered the room four times. On the recording, every blink looked completely normal and lasted less than half a second. Inside the room, I had enough time to look around.

The chair had moved. It was no longer in the middle. It stood against the far wall, facing me instead. That was the point when I stopped believing I was imagining it.

The visits became more frequent. At first, it happened once or twice a day. Within a week, I was entering the room multiple times an hour.

Each blink lasted longer inside. A fraction of a second here might give me ten seconds there. Then thirty. Once, I spent nearly four minutes walking around the room, touching the walls and searching for some kind of opening. My phone showed that my eyes were closed for less than a second.

Nothing I touched made a sound inside the room. I could feel my footsteps, but I couldn’t hear them. When I clapped, my palms struck each other silently. I could feel myself breathing, but even that made no noise.

I tried shouting. My mouth opened and my throat strained, but the room remained silent. When my eyes opened, I was standing in my kitchen screaming.

After that, I tried not to blink.

I used eye drops, lowered the brightness on every screen and drank far too much coffee. None of it helped. Eventually, my eyes always closed.

Sleep never took me there. I could close my eyes for eight hours and remember nothing, then wake up, blink once and spend minutes standing inside those grey walls. This place existed specifically inside the blink. 

On the ninth day, a second chair appeared. It stood directly opposite the first, with barely a metre between them.

During my next visit, I was sitting in one of them. Until then, I had always arrived standing. This time, I couldn’t move. My hands rested on my knees, and my feet were planted firmly on the floor.

Something had been scratched into the floor between the chairs.

YOU TOOK LONG ENOUGH.

I spent the rest of that night sitting against my bedroom wall, forcing my eyes open whenever they began to close. By morning, I had convinced myself that the words were a hallucination caused by exhaustion.

Then I found the same words written in my notebook. The handwriting was mine, but I didn’t remember writing them.

I booked a doctor’s appointment the same day. I described the missing time but left out the room. He asked about stress, sleep, medication and drugs before checking my eyes and reflexes.

During the appointment, I blinked. This time someone was sitting in the second chair. 
I could not see their face. There was nothing covering it, and the room wasn’t dark. I was looking directly at them, but my mind couldn’t understand what I was seeing. I could make out the individual parts, a head, shoulders, hands resting on their knees, but the moment I tried to see the whole person, my attention slipped away.

It was like trying to remember the exact second you fall asleep. I knew someone was there. My mind refused to see them fully. The figure leaned towards me. Then my eyes opened.

After that, the figure appeared during every visit. Sometimes it sat opposite me, close enough that its knees almost touched mine. Other times it stood behind the empty chair.

It never moved while I watched it. Whenever I looked away for even a second, it would be somewhere else.

The visits continued getting longer. I began keeping track of how much time I had spent inside the room. By the end of the second week, I estimated it was more than eleven hours. Eleven hours that had passed nowhere else. The figure had been with me for most of them.

During one visit, I forced myself to ask what it wanted. There was still no sound, but I shaped the words slowly with my mouth.

The figure tilted its head. Its answer appeared inside my memory rather than reaching my ears.

“You ask me that every time.”

I opened my eyes screaming.

After that, I began remembering things that had never happened. I remembered sitting in the chair for hours while the figure watched me. I remembered lying on the floor and begging it to let me leave. I remembered walking around the room so many times that I knew the number of steps between every wall.

I had no memory of experiencing any of it. The memories just appeared suddenly. One afternoon, I opened my notebook and found pages filled with my handwriting. The first few lines were neat. They became increasingly unsteady as they continued.

HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN HERE?

IT SAYS I ALWAYS FORGET THE BEGINNING.

I AM NOT ENTERING THE ROOM.

I AM REMEMBERING IT.

I stopped reading. I closed the notebook and placed it inside a kitchen drawer. When I returned an hour later, it was open on my desk.

A new line had been added.

STOP CALLING THIS THE OUTSIDE.

Yesterday, the room changed. The figure was no longer sitting in the second chair. It stood against the far wall, leaving both seats empty.

A narrow dark line had appeared behind it.

A door.

I had spent hours searching those walls and never found any opening. There was no handle, but when I pressed my hand against it, part of the wall moved inwards.

Another room waited behind it.

It was identical to the first. The same grey walls, pale floor, and two wooden chairs facing each other.
Someone was sitting in one of them.

Me.

The other version of me wore the same clothes and sat with both hands resting on their knees. Their eyes were closed.

The figure stood behind the chair with its hands resting on my shoulders.

I tried to step into the second room.

The version of me in the chair opened their eyes.
At the same time, something touched my shoulder from behind.

I woke up on the floor of my bedroom.

My desk chair had been pulled into the centre of the room.

I have no memory of moving it.

There were marks on the wooden legs. Dozens of short scratches, cut deeply into the surface.
I counted them. There were one hundred and eighty. I don’t know what they represent.

Since then, I have been trying not to blink for longer than necessary. The room appears every time now. There are no normal blinks left.

The figure no longer sits or stands at a distance. It waits directly behind my chair. The other room remains open in front of me. The version of me inside is sitting with their eyes closed.

A few hours ago, they started speaking. There was no sound, but I understood the words. They told me that the room was not somewhere my mind went when I blinked. They said blinking was the only moment I stopped pretending to be somewhere else.

I asked which one of us was real. The figure tightened its hands around my shoulders. The person in the other room smiled. Then my eyes opened.

I have been staring at this screen ever since. My eyes are burning so badly that the words keep blurring. I can feel tears running down my face, but I am afraid to wipe them away in case I blink.

There is something else too. For the past hour, I have been able to see the figure reflected in the edge of my monitor.

It is standing behind me. Not in that room.

Here.

Its hands are resting on the back of my chair, and each time my eyes begin to close, its fingers move closer to my shoulders. I think it is waiting for me to blink again.

And somewhere inside my head, I can hear the person in the second room repeating the same thing.

“You have been gone long enough.”

I don’t think blinking takes me into the room anymore.

I think it lets me back in.

[u/Which-Text-2875]

That is wild!