14: nobody reads these

I said at the top of the first one that nobody reads these anymore. I want to come back to that.

Day nine. Rules holding, mostly. The recap went out on time and my manager didn't look at me at all, which I've decided is the best kind of look. I ate. I'm eating. Kate's plates are getting bigger, I noticed that, the portions, like she's compensating for something she can see and I can't. Fine. I eat the plate.

Corridor. Four doors. Eighteen photos. I've stopped opening them.

Here's the thing I did instead, because the sticky eyes have to go somewhere and I'd rather they went at a screen than at Kate.

I went looking for the others.

It took a while to find the right words, because the right words are all wrong. If you search for the things I've seen you get the stuff you'd expect, the videos, the creepypasta kids, the yellow hallways, and it's all so... decorated. So loud. Everybody in those threads wants it to be a monster. And it's not a monster, it's a hanger with two hooks, and there's no word for that, there's no forum for people who saw a hanger.

But I found one. Not a forum exactly. A thread, on one of the old sites, the kind with the grey background and the timestamps down to the second. Two hundred posts over six years. Title was something like "small things that were briefly wrong." And that was it. That was the whole vibe. People just posting one thing each. A stapler that had no hinge. A crosswalk that counted 9, 10, 8. A stapler that had no hinge, again, different person, four years later, different state.

And about forty posts down, somebody describing my corridor.

Not mine, theirs. A hospital, they said, in a city I've never been to. A hallway between the staff lounge and the ward, four doors on the left, two on the right, a clock nobody sets, a laminated sign so old the color's gone. And one morning, they said, five doors. And they looked back. And four.

Same count. Same clock. Same sign. Different building, different job, different state, six years ago.

I sat there for a long time with the apartment going soft around me, the dishes doing their thing, the light doing its slant, and I thought: it's not our corridor. It was never our corridor. It is THE corridor. The one that got made from everybody's memory of that kind of hallway, and it gets put wherever a hallway like that is needed. Sometimes, in some building, somebody looks. I said that in 10, I was guessing. I'm no longer guessing.

So I posted. Once. I said: same corridor, retail, four doors, clock seven minutes slow, crack in the glass from 4:30 to 10:15. Fifth door. Looked back, 4. That's all I said. I didn't mention this blog, I'm not stupid.

And I got a reply. Eleven minutes. From an account with a long number for a name, no history, and it read:

"stop taking the photo. it's how they count you."

I stared. I read it probably fifty times. Then I went to click the account and the account was gone. Not banned, not deleted, gone, the reply was still there but the name on it was blank, and when I refreshed, the reply was gone too, and when I refreshed again the thread had a little grey banner at the top that said it had been archived for inactivity. Inactivity. I'd posted not twenty minutes earlier.

I'm going to say the paranoid thing and then I'm going to say the other thing, because that's the rule.

Paranoid thing: somebody's minding that thread. Somebody's minding all of them. Two hundred posts over six years is a very manageable number of people to keep an eye on, and when one of them says the exact right thing to another one, the thread gets a banner.

Other thing: old sites archive old threads. Accounts get deleted. People with numbers for names say weird stuff. That's the whole internet.

Both fit. Both always fit. I'm so tired of both fitting.

This blog here has a counter. I never looked at it because nobody reads these, that's the premise, that's why I'm here. Tonight, after the thread, I looked.

Three.

Three views. Not three hundred, three. One on the fourteenth, the day I wrote about the stranger forgetting. One on the seventeenth, the day I put the pill in my pocket. And one tonight, about an hour ago, while I was reading the thread.

And a comment.

There's one comment on this entire blog and it's on entry 05, the clock one, the embarrassing one, and it doesn't have a name on it, the name field is just empty, and it says:

"it's not a smile."

That's all. It's not a smile.

I need to explain why that made me freeze, put the laptop down, and go stand in the kitchen.

In the notebook, the paper one I write in, the one that lives in my work bag, I drew the crack. Back in March, before any of this, the first week, I sketched the clock face and I drew the crack across it, 4:30 up to past 10, and next to it I wrote "looks like a smile." Because it does. It curves. I've never typed that. It's not in 01, it's not in 05, it's not anywhere on this blog. It's in pen, in a notebook, in a bag, in my apartment.

Nobody reads these. Somebody read that.

I've been standing in the kitchen with the lights off for a while. Kate's door is shut and her light's off and I can hear her breathing, actually breathing, slow, asleep. My bag's on the hook by the door where I always put it. The notebook's in it. I checked. It's in there. Nobody's been in it, well, I can't tell if anybody's been in it, that's not a thing you can tell about a notebook. I don’t think anyone has been in it.

It's not a smile.

They're right. I've been looking at that crack every morning for three years and calling it a smile in my head and it's not, it's a crack, it's glass giving up the ghost. That's what it looks like when something that was supposed to hold doesn't.

I'm going to leave the comment up. I'm not going to reply to it. I'm going to take the photo tomorrow because rule two is rule two and because if it's how they count me then they've already counted me eighteen times and one more isn't going to make a damn difference.

Three views. I don't know who you are. I know one of you can see my handwriting. I dislike that.