I’ve done some wild things inside my head.

I’m not much of a talker–quiet type, really. I like to watch. Observe. Pick apart the patterns in people, in moments, in memories. I don’t always find something worth analyzing, though. And on those days, I go deeper. Inward. Looking for something else. Secrets. Mechanisms. Truths.

One time, I went searching for an off switch–just to see if my brain had one. I found it. It looked like a lever, tucked away in a quiet corner of myself. Being the curious sort, I flipped it.

Everything started shutting down. My thoughts dulled. A heavy fog rolled in behind my eyes. I felt like I was slipping into the deepest sleep imaginable. And then… I stopped breathing.

Panic hit like lightning. I clawed my way back to the lever and yanked it hard to ON.

Air rushed back into my lungs like floodwaters. I gasped. Trembled. Adrenaline surged through me like fire. I’d never felt so alive–and so close to not being alive. I never pulled that lever again.

But that wasn’t the only time I wandered too deep.

There was another place. A darker place. A corridor in my mind with no lights, no sound–just a presence. And there, etched like a scar into the mental floorboards, was a line.

I knew what it was the moment I saw it. No signs. No warnings. You just know. It was the threshold between sanity and madness.

There was a voice on the other side, faint but seductive. It beckoned. “Come see for yourself.”

And so, like a fool chasing forbidden knowledge, I crossed the line.

I ran headfirst into the abyss.

The screams were the first to greet me–children’s screams, full of panic, pleading, pain. Sounds I pray to forget. Then came the visions: twisted, unholy, splattered in crimson. The laughter–mine–wasn’t mine at all. It was fractured. Crooked.

I felt teeth in my mouth that didn’t belong to me. Felt the hunger. The thrill of violence. I saw myself smiling, wide and unnatural, as I tore and devoured and destroyed.

But something in me resisted.

I turned and ran. Hard. Blindly. Toward the line, praying it was still there.

When I crossed back, the silence was deafening. The relief… indescribable.

I never looked back.

I don’t want to know what happens if you stay on the other side too long.

I never searched for the line again.

I never will.