What the screen hides

It started with my phone lighting up in a dark room with no notifications. Just glow. Like something was checking if I was still there. I’d pick it up and the screen felt colder than it should, like it had been held before me. At first I blamed sleep, but then I noticed the reflection didn’t sync right. Not delayed. Not broken. Just slightly wrong.

Like something standing just outside the angle I was allowed to see directly, only showing itself through glass and light. I’d tilt the phone and catch her — not a face I could define, just a pale distortion shaped like a woman cut out of darkness instead of drawn into it. Gothic in the worst way. Like absence learned form.

She never appeared on purpose. Only in reflections. Lock screen. Camera preview. Black screen after calls. Every time the display went dark, there was a half second where she existed before the phone fully shut off. Like the device was briefly revealing something it wasn’t built to carry.

I stopped using my phone near mirrors.

Because that’s where it escalated.

Reflection inside reflection — my face, the room, and sometimes her slightly offset from both. Not moving. Not reacting. Just present. Like she belonged more to the glass than the space behind me. And every time I noticed her too clearly, she vanished instantly, like being seen was a rule she learned to avoid breaking.

But she always came back.

Phones became harder to ignore. Not because I feared them, but because they became the only consistent place she existed. Real life started feeling unstable. Screens started feeling like confirmation. That’s what messed with me — I began trusting the phone more than my own eyes.

Dark rooms changed after that. They didn’t feel empty anymore. They felt unrendered. Like if I held up my screen at the right angle, I could catch what the room was hiding from direct vision. And sometimes I did. Never clearly. Just enough to make my stomach drop before my mind could explain it away.

She never spoke. Never moved like something alive. It was worse — she felt like darkness learning how to take shape without becoming human. No details, no identity, just the same repeating outline appearing in every reflective surface that shouldn’t have depth.

I started getting stuck in loops.

Unlock phone. Black screen flash — she’s there. Lock it. Still there for a fraction. Camera open. Wrong angle. Close it. Still feel watched. It stopped feeling like seeing and started feeling like acknowledgment. Like every interaction was also permission.

Even silence changed.

Rooms felt heavier when the phone was near, like it anchored something into space. When I left it alone, the feeling didn’t disappear — it just waited. Like it didn’t need the device anymore, only my attention.

That’s when I stopped trying to prove it wasn’t real.

Because it didn’t behave like imagination anymore.

It behaved like repetition.

Same presence. Same timing. Same impossible position between reflection and reality

138 BPM dark goth trap, cathedral reverb, detuned music box, deep 808s, glitch phone tones, eerie choir pads, silence