the whispering void

Repeated near-death experiences can lead to a gradual detachment from the physical world, heightening an individual's sensitivity to the thoughts and emotions of others, thereby fostering emerging telepathic abilities.

Late at night, as he wanders the empty streets, he hears whispers—fragments of words with no source. They slither into his mind like tendrils of smoke, curling at the edges of his awareness, too faint to grasp but impossible to ignore.

At first, he tells himself it's the wind. A trick of the night. But the wind doesn't murmur in broken sentences.

"I forgot to lock the door… No, wait. Did I? What if someone's already inside—"

The voice is distant, muffled, like someone speaking from behind a thick wall. He turns sharply, scanning the empty street. There's no one. Just the dull hum of flickering streetlights, the occasional car rolling by in the distance.

Then, another whisper.

"Smile. Just smile. If I pretend long enough, maybe I'll believe it too."

His breath hitches—but no, that's wrong. He doesn't breathe.

Lian stares ahead at a couple walking past him, their faces barely illuminated by the neon signs above. Their lips never move, yet their voices coil through his mind like something alive.

He stumbles back, but the whispers don't stop.

A man crosses the street, hands stuffed deep in his coat pockets.

"If I step in front of that car now… would it hurt? Would anyone notice?"

Lian's stomach twists. The man keeps walking, unaware that someone—something—has heard his deepest thought.

He tests it. He focuses on a teenage girl sitting alone on a bench, scrolling through her phone.

"Please text back. Please. Just once. I won't ask for anything else."

The weight of her desperation settles into his chest like a stone.

The world around him feels thinner now, stretched too tight, as if he's pressing against a surface that was never meant to be touched.

Then, he hears laughter.

Not out loud.

Inside his head.

Cold, empty, wrong.

It doesn't belong to any of them.

Lian stiffens, his form flickering beneath the streetlights.

The whispers continue.

But now, something else is listening too.

At first, it's manageable. The voices are faint, like echoes in a vast, empty corridor. He can ignore them if he tries hard enough, can will himself to believe that they are just passing noise, nothing more than the background static of a world he no longer belongs to.

But then, the voices grow louder.

Not just words, but emotions—raw, unfiltered, seeping into his very being like ink staining water.

He doesn't just hear them. He feels them.

The suffocating dread of a man standing before his boss, rehearsing the words that will never leave his throat. The quiet, creeping rage of a girl forcing herself to smile through clenched teeth. The icy terror of a child staring at the closet door, knowing—knowing—something is watching from the dark.

And the worst ones. The ones that linger long after they've faded.

A woman gripping a knife in the kitchen, her mind a swirling storm of hate and despair. I could do it right now. He wouldn't even see it coming.

A man sitting in his car outside his home, staring at the garage ceiling. If I close my eyes and press the gas, I won't have to wake up tomorrow.

A teenager scrolling through their phone, pretending to laugh at memes. No one would care. I could disappear and nothing would change.

Lian feels his chest tighten, his mind drowning in the weight of all these people, their secrets, their pain. He wants to shut it off. He needs to shut it off.

But how can he silence voices that aren't his own?

How can he run from thoughts that live inside his head?

---

Days, weeks—maybe even months—pass. Time has lost its meaning anyways.

He tries to hold onto himself, to keep the whispers at bay. But with every passing moment, the boundaries between himself and them weaken.

A businessman walks past him, and for a second, Lian feels the weight of a mortgage, a failing marriage, a drinking problem he refuses to acknowledge.

A woman passes, and suddenly, Lian remembers a childhood dog—a golden retriever named Milo. But it's not his memory. He's never owned a dog.

And then, it gets worse.

One night, he stumbles into an alley, clutching his head, trying to drown out the noise. But then—snap—he's not in the alley anymore.

He's in a dimly lit bedroom, staring at a cracked mirror. His hands are shaking, his knuckles bruised. There's a bottle of pills spilled across the floor.

Except—

These hands aren't his.

This body isn't his.

The reflection isn't his.

He gasps, and suddenly, he's back in the alley, knees scraping against the cold pavement. His form flickers. His chest aches, but not from his own pain.

From theirs.

He doesn't just hear anymore.

He lives.

---

It doesn't take long before he stops being sure of who he is.

He reaches for memories, but finds theirs instead. His childhood is blurred, replaced with thousands of different lives. He cannot tell where one voice ends and another begins.

Is he Lian, standing on an empty street, or is he the grieving woman sobbing into her hands at the edge of a hospital bed?

Is he the vengeful soul with bloodied fingers, or the helpless victim gasping for air?

He is an old man dying alone in his bed, whispering the name of a child that never visits.

He is a girl running through the woods, lungs burning, unseen eyes watching from the dark.

He is a prisoner, counting the cracks in the ceiling, waiting for death that will never come.

He is everyone and no one, stretched across existence like a tattered veil.

And then, the most terrifying realization dawns.

If he absorbs enough—if he lets go completely—he will cease to be Lian at all. His consciousness will dissolve, not into death, but into an endless, chaotic swirl of borrowed lives.

An entity that feels everything but belongs to nothing.

He wonders if this is what death was always meant to be. Not an end, but a dispersion. A slow, inevitable unraveling into something vast and incomprehensible.

Yet a part of him wonders…

If he were to surrender to the flood, would he finally escape his cursed loop?

Or would he become something far worse—an eternal echo of suffering, an anomaly lost in the endless tide of human consciousness?

And worse still…

If he is no longer Lian…

Then who will be left to remember that he ever existed?