I’ve been sitting at this dark window for hours, staring out into the black voids of the universe; I’ve been watching the stars twinkle from beyond our reach. It’s not that I find them particularly interesting, they aren’t, at least not from this distance; It’s that I dread the idea of going to my room in the upper deck of this solitary spaceship.

I’m alone. I know I have to keep watch, I know it’s my job; But after a thousand days suspended in the dark things begin to seem different. The lights speak to me in morse code. The symbols on the doors change and morph into messages from another place and the walls whisper at me when I’m not looking.

“How much longer are you gonna be here?” they ask.

“Why don’t you open the airlock and die?”

Laughter echoes through the hallways during the nights, or it could be the dripping of the coffee I set up. I’m not sure anymore, but the idea of me being alone seems less likely every day I spend in this silent outpost. This is why I spend my time staring at the stars outside, I don’t want to look behind me; I don’t want to find the monster that lurks around the corner, just out of sight.

I can sense it when I eat my lunch, crawling underneath my table. I can hear its footsteps outside my room when I’m taking a shower, and I know that one day it’s going to stab me in the back as I climb the stairwell towards my bed. One of these days it’s going to lose its coyness and it’s going to leap out from my shadow and end me… and I don’t want to end. I want to live, I want to go back home and see my wife, my children.

I’m not sure I can evade it. Last night I saw its face… it was me.

Recorded by Levenstein