I need to tell someone this. I've been sitting here for twenty minutes trying to work up the nerve to dial. My hands are shaking. They always shake when I think about it. It's been over twenty years and my hands still shake. I'm sorry. Okay. I can do this. This was back in 2003. I was nineteen, living alone in this little studio apartment in Flagstaff while I finished my sophomore year at NAU. I'd gotten really into meditation that year. Not the casual kind, I mean deep practice. Hours every day. I'd read all these books about transcendental states, astral projection, that sort of thing. I thought I was becoming enlightened. I thought I was special. I still don't know how else to explain it. God, I wish I'd never started.
It started happening around February. I'd be sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor, eyes closed, breathing slow, and I'd feel this... lightness. Not like relaxation. Like actual physical lightness. Like gravity was letting go of me. The first time it happened, I thought I was imagining it. But then I felt the carpet leave my legs. I felt the air underneath me. I was floating. Maybe six inches off the ground, but I was floating. I could feel myself hovering there, perfectly balanced, perfectly still. I didn't open my eyes. Something told me not to. I don't know why. It was just this instinct. Keep your eyes closed. Don't look. Just feel it. So I did. And it kept happening. Every time I meditated deep enough, I'd rise. Sometimes a few inches. Sometimes I'd feel myself drift higher. I started measuring it by how cold the air got. The higher I floated, the colder it felt. My apartment had terrible insulation and the ceiling was always freezing in winter.
By March, I was getting cocky about it. I'd been doing this for weeks. Rising up, floating there, coming back down soft as a feather. I thought I'd mastered something. I thought I'd tapped into some power that other people couldn't access. But there were things I noticed. Things I tried to ignore. Sometimes when I was up there, floating in the dark behind my eyelids, I'd hear something. Breathing that wasn't mine. This wet, rattling sound, like air moving through something that shouldn't have lungs. I told myself it was the heating vents. I told myself it was pipes. I told myself anything except what it actually sounded like. And sometimes, sometimes I'd feel something watching me. ceilings from bad insulation are the worst - Faith' You know that feeling when someone's staring at the back of your head? It was like that, except it was coming from everywhere at once. From above me. From beside me. From inside the darkness itself.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]