Chapter 1

I'm 23. For the last month and a half I've been more or less nocturnal. Not on purpose, it's just what hYour thoughts don't belong to youappens when you stop having reasons to be awake during the day. Red eyes, gray skin, the face of a guy who quit telling day and night apart a while ago. You know the look. I'm not going to get into why I started this whole thing. Part of it is personal, and part of it is that after last night I don't think the "why" matters anymore. Short version: 47 days ago I decided to learn how to stop thinking.

I don't mean relaxing. I don't mean "clearing your head." I mean actually stopping. Full silence in there, even for ten seconds.

I know it was 47 days because I wrote the number on a sheet of paper and taped it to my wall like a lunatic.

The wall deserves its own paragraph, actually. By last night the wall next to my desk was covered edge to edge in printouts. Psychology articles, studies, scanned pages out of books. A lot of them crossed out in red marker. One was about the white bear experiment, that old study where they told people "don't think about a white bear" and then a white bear was all anyone could think about. Another one was literally titled "Why you can't stop thinking," which at 3am reads less like an article and more like the wall making fun of you. In between the printouts I had sticky notes. "Meditation – didn't help." "White noise – didn't help." "Breathing method – didn't help."

In the middle of all that, one big sheet where I'd written in crooked letters:

THE THOUGHT COMES BEFORE YOU CAN STOP IT.

Under it, a second sheet: DAY 47.

If you've never tried this, that top sheet is the whole problem. You can't catch a thought before it happens. By the time you notice you're thinking, you already thought it. Every method I tried lost to that one stupid fact.

So. Last night. Around 2 or 3am, I'd stopped checking by then. The monitor was the only light in the room. There was a bowl of buldak on the desk (the Korean fire noodles) that had gone cold at least an hour earlier, and I was still picking at it. Not because I was hungry. It was just there. The room was quiet in that way where the PC fan becomes a whole presence, and you can hear the clicks of your own mouse wheel, and underneath that, your own breathing. Which is a great thing to be aware of when you're trying not to think.

I was deep in dead subreddits. The abandoned kind, where the newest post is from years ago. If you've never gone digging through those, it feels like walking around a mall that closed down. My search history was the same three lines over and over. "How to stop thinking." "Intrusive thoughts help." "Can't stop thoughts."

Scroll. Nothing. Refresh. Nothing. Refresh.

Refresh again.

My finger pressed the button. Then, a second later, I frowned at my own hand, because I'd literally just refreshed and there was zero reason to do it again. It wasn't a decision. My finger just did it.

The page jumped. New post.

I stopped scrolling. Posted four minutes ago. Zero upvotes. Zero shares. The author showed as [deleted]. Just a title:

"Your thoughts don't belong to you."

I opened it. It's still on my screen right now, so this is word for word:

Have you ever tried to stop thinking? Not distracting yourself. Not replacing one thought with another. Completely stopping the stream of thoughts, even for ten seconds.

You can't. A thought appears before you manage to stop it. That's exactly why what happens next is impossible to control. From this second on, every thought you have begins to become reality.

Under the post there was exactly one comment, left two minutes before:

I jokingly imagined that someone was standing in my room. He just looks at me and doesn't blink. Please… tell me how to stop thinking…

I smirked at that. Cheap roleplay. Give it ten minutes and the rest of the creepypasta crowd shows up and they all start playing along with each other in the comments. Seen it a hundred times.

I was already reaching to close the tab when my eyes caught on the commenter's username.

u/whitebear_off

Something about it felt familiar. That itch you get from a face at a bus stop you can't place. I frowned at it for a second.

Then I shrugged it off. I'd had "white bear" printed on my wall for a month and a half. Of course the word felt familiar.

I leaned back in my chair (it creaks like it hates me) and closed my eyes. And I remember the exact thought, in that sarcastic voice you keep for yourself:

"Sure. Now I'll open my eyes and there'll be some toothy thing standing right in front of me."

I opened my eyes.

There was a face maybe two inches from mine.

Pale. Almost see-through, that's the best I can do. The mouth was stretched into a smile that was too wide, wider than a face should allow. The eyes were completely black. No whites at all. And they were pointed straight into my pupils.

It didn't move.

It didn't breathe.

It didn't blink.

It just looked at me.

For a second the room went dead still and my heart sort of tripped over itself. And then I did the stupidest thing I have ever done, which is saying something, considering the rest of this post.

I slapped it.

Pure reflex. Like swatting a mosquito hovering in front of your nose. I slapped the thing across the face.

It kept looking at me.

Silence.

Then my brain caught up with what exactly I'd just smacked, and I screamed and threw myself backwards. The chair went over with a crash. The noodle bowl hit the floor. I scrambled back on all fours until my back hit the wall, cold through my shirt. The thing hadn't gone anywhere. Its head turned after me, slow. The smile stayed exactly the same.

"No."

The thought was already there before I could do anything about it.

"This is impossible."

I squeezed my eyes shut. It's not here. It's a picture in my head. Don't think about it. Just don't think about it.

I opened my eyes. It was closer.

It hadn't walked over. I'm sure of that. There was nothing in between. It was just closer.

My breathing came apart. And I thought, because I couldn't not think it:

"It's getting closer."

Same second. Closer again.

I froze. For a few seconds we just looked at each other, me and this thing. And that's when it started sinking in. I moved my eyes to the corner of the room, very carefully.

"Let it… let it be over there."

It vanished. And it was standing in the far corner of the room. No motion. Nothing in between. Just there now.

I couldn't take my eyes off it. And the thing I'd just figured out made everything worse, not better. If it moved when my thoughts moved, then the problem wasn't it.

The problem was me.

I dug my fingers into my hair and pulled, like pain could mute the thoughts for even a second.

"Just disappear. Disappear."

Nothing. It stood in the corner with those black eyes on me.

"I don't want to see you. I don't want to see anything at all."

My thoughts were tripping over each other at this point, interrupting each other. The harder I pushed toward anything else, the harder my brain snapped back to that smile. Remember the white bear? That. Except the bear was standing in my room.

The panic won.

"Let all of it disappear. The room. The walls. Everything. I just want none of this to be here."

I screwed my eyes shut, clamped my hands over my head, and held my breath. Some part of me had decided that if I could just hold that for a few seconds, it would all end on its own.

One second.

Two.

Three.

I opened my eyes.

The thing was gone.

So was everything else.

No room. No desk. No monitor. No walls, no ceiling, no floor. All of it, gone. In every direction there was darkness. And I don't mean night, and I don't mean a room with the lights off. Emptiness. So in total I couldn't tell if I was even standing on anything.

I turned in a slow circle. Same everywhere I looked. Black going on forever, no sound, nothing to even point at.

"No. That's… that's not what I wanted."

I was breathing hard. And it finally landed: I hadn't erased the monster. I'd erased the world. Every single thing I'd thought in that panic had come true.

I stood there without moving for a long time. My heart slowed down on its own after a while. Breathing evened out. Nothing around me moved, nothing happened, there was just my own breathing and all that black. I took a careful step forward. Then another. Nothing changed.

"So there's really nothing here."

I dragged a hand down my face, trying to get any two thoughts to line up. And that's when the line from the post came back to me.

"…every thought you have begins to become reality."

I stopped.

If that rule was still running, then the emptiness around me was my thought too.

I hesitated for a few seconds. Scared to test it, which is a strange thing to be, considering the alternative was standing in nothing forever.

"Let my chair be here."

Out of the dark, right in front of me, my chair. The same old creaky computer chair. It arrived slowly. I don't have a better word for it.

I stepped up and touched it.

Solid. Real.

I think that was the first time anything like a smile happened on my face all night.

"It worked."

Deep breath.

"Desk."

The desk showed up next to it.

"Monitor."

Monitor, on the desk.

"Walls… door… ceiling… floor…"

And the room put itself back together around me, piece by piece, like the world was being handed back in chunks. A few seconds later everything looked pretty much the way it had a few minutes before. I looked around slowly. I'd done it. I'd actually put it all back.

The smile lasted about a second.

The bowl of noodles was on the desk.

I never thought about the noodles.

The monitor was already on.

I never thought about turning it on. I know I didn't.

And on the screen, that same post was open.

Something cold went down my spine, slow.

"I didn't imagine that."

I walked toward the desk without exactly deciding to. Everything in me was yelling to turn around and leave, and my legs kept carrying me forward. The screen just sat there glowing with the post like nothing had happened. I ran my eyes over the text again on autopilot, then looked below it. The comment was still there. The only one.

I jokingly imagined that someone was standing in my room. He just looks at me and doesn't blink. Please… tell me how to stop thinking…

My eyes slid down to the username on their own.

u/whitebear_off

That little jab in the chest again. I had seen this name before.

I looked up at the top right corner of the screen.

At the logged-in account.

u/whitebear_off

I didn't move.

"No…"

Hand shaking, I looked at the comment again. Then at my profile. Then back at the comment.

Same username. Letter for letter.

"I… didn't write this."

I opened my profile. The comment history came up.

One. Two. Three. Ten.

All posted from my account. All under posts with the same title.

"Your thoughts don't belong to you."

I kept scrolling and they kept coming. A day ago. A week ago. Two weeks. Almost every single day.

And in every one of them, the same line:

"Please… tell me how to stop thinking…"

I slowly put my phone down. No, sorry, the mouse. It was the mouse. My hand was shaking hard enough that the cursor was skidding all over the screen.

I looked at the wall.

The sheets. Dozens of sheets, covered in writing.

I ripped the nearest one down.

My handwriting.

Then a second one. A third.

The same phrase, written over and over. Some words crossed out, other words wedged in above them. Like someone had made dozens of attempts to word one single text exactly right.

I went through the pages faster and faster until I got to the last one.

Across the top, in big letters:

"Your thoughts don't belong to you."

Below that, in ink that still looked fresh:

"Day 47. Final version."

I lowered the sheet.

"This can't… this can't be."

I'd spent the whole night trying to find the person who wrote that post.

And I was standing in the middle of my own room, holding his draft.