Thirty-Two Messages

This Morning

This just happened. Literally, I just saw this like three hours ago, and I need to tell someone about it or I'm going to lose my mind.

I woke up this morning and grabbed my phone like always. 32 message notifications. I thought it was some kind of glitch, you know, sometimes the messaging app freaks out and groups weird things. I ignored it for a moment.

I opened the screen. All 32 messages were from my own number.

Like, from me. My number. The same one I have in the phone I was holding.

I thought it was a bug. A notification loop or something. But I opened them.

The messages started at 3:00 in the morning and ended at 5:03 AM. I was asleep. I'm sure of it. I don't remember waking up, I don't remember anything.

And this is where it gets really weird.

The messages weren't a monologue. They were a conversation. A conversation between two people, both from my number. One message would say something, and the next would reply to it. Like there were two voices using the same phone to talk to each other.

I know that doesn't make sense. I know technically it's not possible. But I swear, that's what I saw.

Most of the messages were weird fragments, things I didn't understand, broken sentences. But there was one voice asking questions and another answering. One would ask things like 'where did you leave it?' or 'when are you coming back?'. The other would answer with things I didn't understand, references to nothing I recognized.

I ran to check the call log. Nothing. The sent messages folder. Nothing. No trace of those messages on my end. It's like I received them but never sent them. They exist in my inbox and nowhere else.

I read through everything. Most of it didn't make sense. But I found a snippet that did. More or less. I copied it here, word for word:

"does he know we're here?"

"not yet."

"when do we tell him?"

"when he's ready."

I took screenshots of everything. I don't know what it means. I don't know who the 'he' they're talking about is. I don't know if it's me.

The last message arrived at 5:03 AM. It just said this:

"I know where you keep the spare key now."

I have a spare key under a rock in the back of the building. I've been in this apartment for two years. I haven't told anyone. No one. Not my mom, not my friends, not my ex. No one.

What I Did

I went to check on the key before I even finished reading the message. I went down in my pajamas, barefoot, I didn't care.

It was there.

But... I don't know. I think it was in a different position. I always put the rock with the flat side up and the key underneath diagonally to the right. Today it was diagonally to the left. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's my head already looking for weird things. But I think it was different.