The Number That Called Itself
The night began with a simple chime, the kind that sounds harmless until it lingers. I was huddled beneath a quilt of cold air and the glow of a screen that refused to sleep. The phone, a relic I kept mostly for emergencies, lit up with an incoming call—only the caller ID flickered for a breath, then steadied on a sequence that startled me into silence: the same digits as my own, the number I never gave to anyone, the number that belongs to me alone.
At first I blamed a glitch, a prank, a trick of the moonlight bouncing off the glass. But the voice that answered was not a joke. It spoke in a tone I recognized too well—my own cadence, the precise tempo of the thoughts I keep to myself. The words were fragments of conversations I had never finished: promises I swore I never made, warnings I would have chosen to ignore, every unspoken boundary laid bare in a whisper that felt like a footprint on my skull.
- The call arrives at the same hour, now and again, as if time itself is dialing me back to a moment I wasn’t ready to relive.
- The caller ID shows my own digits, a cruel echo that refuses to vanish despite the many times I blocked the number.
- The voice repeats phrases I have not spoken aloud since the day I decided not to act on them: “Lock the doors,” “Do not answer,” “Walk away from the window when the streetlight flickers.”
- Voicemail records snippets of a conversation that never happened in my life, as if a parallel version of me had already lived through it and left behind a breadcrumb trail for me to follow.
- Physically, the phone’s warmth feels wrong, like a heartbeat pressed against a charging port, as though the device itself is awakening to become something more—or less—than a tool.
One night, compelled by a curiosity that tasted like copper on my tongue, I pressed the green button and whispered a question into the hollow night: Who are you? The response was almost tender, a careful disclosure that unsettled me more than any scream—“I am the you that stayed where you turned away.” The line went dead, then rang again with a single, breathless note, as if the universe exhaled and forgot to inhale.
“If you know what you did, you’ll hear the truth in the quiet between rings.”
Since then I have learned to listen differently. I no longer search for the source of the call; I listen for the way it rearranges the room when I answer. The clock ticks with a new confidence, the apartment seems to tilt just enough that the shadows gather closer, and my own reflection—once a quiet companion—now acts as a witness. The number remains a patient, unblinking harbinger of choices I haven’t made, a reminder that some calls aren’t meant to be answered so much as understood. And in that understanding, I begin to hear the other self breathing beside me, a whisper that promises both a release and a consequence I have yet to fully fathom. The line remains open, and the night, in its own strange mercy, keeps listening back.