From Shadow

Growing up, I could never shake the feeling that I was being followed. Almost everywhere I went, I felt like someone was watching me from a corner. I never caught anyone following me, but it kept me on edge all the time. When I opened up about the issue to my friends and family, my parents secretly assigned a private investigator to keep an eye on me.

We had an argument about it, and they agreed to call the PI off. I tried not to allow myself to fixate on my fears of being stalked, and to some degree, it worked, as I started to spend more time with friends during the latter stage of my highschool years. However, those fears slowly crawled back into my mind once I moved from my hometown to work in the city; and in my small apartment, I began to sense a presence I had never even felt anywhere else. Or so I thought…

Towards the end of the first week at my new apartment, I began to see the same recurring dream from my childhood that I had long forgotten. It was of a cloaked figure, enshrouded in a dark mist, that would follow close behind me. They were relentless, but while they felt threatening as a child, as an adult, it almost felt as if they were desperate. I couldn’t understand what it meant.

I saw a therapist, but it got me nowhere; the pills didn’t work, and neither did the sessions. The strange dreams became more frequent, and I often found myself losing sleep. However, what I saw within the dreams slowly began to evolve as the weeks passed by: the dark figure started reaching out to me—they were shivering. “Please…” they said. “Undo these shackles.”

I wished that I could communicate with them, but I often woke up right after hearing their pleas. One evening, while deep in thought, I remembered something from my childhood: there was a book in which I wrote stories about my imaginary friend: Shadow. I never finished the story, but where I left off, Shadow was stuck in between realms, unable to escape to the real world. Was the figure in my dreams really Shadow? There was only one way to find out.

I resumed the story right away, and as I did, a message began to emerge at the top of the page. “Thank you so much,” it said. It was proof that Shadow was indeed the presence that had followed me around for so many years. I was horrible for leaving them trapped for so long. I remembered the original ending of my story—the one both Shadow and I agreed on all those years ago.

I spent the entire night perfecting the story, and by the time the first morning rays snuck in through my windows, I had finally reached the ending. A gust of shadows erupted from the book and spread across the room before dissipating softly into the air. The dancing dark mists slowly sank into the floor and crawled towards my own shadow, melding with it.

“Thank you… I’m finally home, ” Shadow said.

“Welcome back, old friend,” I replied.