Confessions of a DPH Addict

Entry Nineteen

***

**Entry Nineteen: When the House Forgets**

I wake up already tired, which should be impossible. Fatigue feels heavy enough to be physical — a sandbag draped across the chest — though memory insists I never slept.

A dull ache sits behind my eyes, the kind of throb that doesn’t pulse with the heartbeat but with thought itself. I press the heel of my palm against my temples. The pressure helps but only a fraction.

Light filters through the window at a color science hasn’t named. Not dawn, not dusk, just the neutral pallor of indecision — a suspended hour that doesn’t belong to either category. The air tastes like wet plaster.

I don’t move yet. The house is still switching itself on.

Under the floorboards: a rhythmic expansion and contraction, slow and purposeful. The house is breathing again. I tell myself I’ve simply learned to notice air‑conditioning. I tell myself a lot of things.

***

The spiders are behaving.

They cling to corners, neat little congregations shaped like punctuation marks across the ceiling line. I count six without turning my head. Maybe eight if I count the ones that flicker in peripheral vision.

They’re smaller now, polite. Yesterday they were translucent giants clawing at the edges of sight. Today they hover like ink splatters, threads trembling in drafts I can’t feel.

“Progress,” I whisper. The word echoes wrong, like someone already said it before me.

From the bed the ceiling looks lower, drooping. I roll onto my side. The pillow smells faintly of salt. I don’t know if it’s sweat or the ocean I keep dreaming about.

When I sit, the mattress sighs underneath, almost affectionate. For half a second I swear it exhales my name — stretched, whispered — *Iriiiina.* The pause afterward feels rehearsed, a magician waiting for applause that never comes.

My hands tremble, small but definite tremors that make each finger unfamiliar. The skin looks too thin, the veins too high, like tiny rivers mapped onto someone else’s anatomy.

***

A glass of water waits at my bedside. Perfectly filled. Perfectly still. I can’t remember pouring it.

I stare at the surface until my eyes blur, waiting for the slightest movement — a ripple, dust shaker, proof of intrusion. Nothing.

When I drink, the water tastes faintly metallic, as if the glass remembers older versions of me.

My stomach rejects it at first, unfamiliar with generosity.

***

The spiders follow my movements subtlely. When I stretch, they lean. When I inhale, legs twitch across walls. Like puppets waiting for a cue.

One detaches, lowering on its line then retracting halfway, as though it changed its mind mid‑descent. Another shifts closer to the reflection trembling in the windowpane, testing boundary physics.

I’m not scared anymore — not exactly. Fear’s burned itself out; fatigue left behind in its place, a type of surrender that looks like calm.

***

The mirror on the far wall has been uncovered. Either I did it or the house made the choice for me.

From across the room, I can already tell something’s off. The angle. The color temperature. The way the reflected light seems slower to react.

Still, I get up and walk toward it — small steps, deliberate pace, as if I’m approaching an animal that’s considering whether or not to bite.

The woman in the mirror looks familiar until she doesn’t. Face marginally rearranged — eyes wider, mouth thinner, skin color approximating life rather than possessing it.

She tilts her head a second later than I do. Not lag; reluctance.

“See?” I whisper. “We’re fine.”

The word fine wobbles before landing. The mirror doesn’t correct me.

Behind me, the house settles. The sound imitates footsteps descending stairs that don’t exist.

***

I move through the hallway toward the kitchen. Each step hums faintly underfoot, as if pressure triggers quiet machinery.

Halfway there, the walls pulse once — bright then ordinary.

I stop, breathing through the sour rush of dizziness. The spiders are tracking me again, silhouettes following ceiling curvature like constellations predicting an eclipse.

The note on the counter greets me when I arrive. My handwriting, black marker on lined paper:

*Be careful.*

No signature, no explanation.

I fold it once before tossing it into the sink. It lands without sound.

Then immediately regret. What if it was new? What if today was the day I meant something different by it?

I fish the paper back out. My fingers leave damp thumbprints, partial evidence of guilt.

***

Crackers. Peanut butter. The safe meal. Same as the last time I remember eating — if memory hasn’t been rearranged since then.

Each bite feels laborious, like chewing insulation. The roof of my mouth sticks to itself.

Halfway through, nausea blooms. Quick, absolute.

I push the plate away and sit breathing slow measured breaths until the room steadies.

The hum in the walls deepens meanwhile, a mechanical purr imitating relaxation.

From the doorway, spiders have migrated closer. I catch movement at the periphery: dozens, now hundreds maybe, lining crown‑molding in cinematic lines of patience.

“I see you,” I whisper. “You don’t have to hide.”

The silence that follows is heavy enough to have texture.

***

Three knocks.

Sharp, even. The kind that arrive with purpose.

My pulse abandons rhythm.

No visitors. Not since — whenever that was.

The air flattens, waiting.

I approach the door slowly. Peephole: empty hallway, washed in color so neutral it feels synthetic.

Still, something about the light unhinges me — too flat, too studio.

I open the door anyway.

Cold rushes in. The street beyond looks painted, its perspective wrong like backdrop scenery in a half‑funded play. Houses lean slightly toward the horizon.

No sound except my breathing.

I shut the door, bolt it. Listen. Nothing moves except air.

When I turn, I’m certain the spiders have replicated — twice, maybe three times in number. Uniform arrangement, ceiling to floor. An army rehearsing patience.

***

I retreat to the bedroom, the only place left pretending to belong to me.

The notebook waits on the bedspread. My handwriting covers the open page: jagged, diagonal, legible only because desperation insists it be so.

I read a sentence I definitely didn’t write:

*If you wake somewhere unfamiliar, remember to stay quiet until the shapes stop moving.*

I don’t know what that means.

Still, I underline it twice.

***

The bathroom light hums like trapped bees.

I stand in the doorway for a full minute before stepping over the threshold.

Colors thin at the edges — walls draining first, tiles following, as though reality itself has a blood pressure problem.

The mirror above the sink flickers static, catches it, smooths — then returns my face wearing an expression I don’t remember rehearsing: blank interest.

“I’m fine,” I whisper.

This time I add a smile so faint it could be apology.

From behind me, the hall exhales slow warm air.

I shut the door. Lock clicks with the finality of small decisions pretending to be big ones.

***

Hours dissolve. Or seconds. Or maybe none pass at all.

Somewhere between one blink and the next, the world tilts forward.

I feel water before I see it. It laps at my skin – shallow, lukewarm, metallic tasting like drifted pennies.

The porcelain edge presses into my back. My hair clings weightless to the water’s surface.

For a long, directionless moment I can’t tell where I am, only that I shouldn’t be horizontal, shouldn’t be surrounded by this echoing quiet.

Then the word hits: bathtub.

I lift my head. Pain responds before memory does. Legs hum with something between ache and heat.

The water isn’t clear but not dark either — a murk of diluted color impossible to name. It moves faintly when I breathe.

Panic arrives in waves, subdued, like an emotion translated through a bad speaker.

“What happened,” I say aloud. The voice cracking might as well belong to anyone.

Above me, the spider on the ceiling lowers itself almost fully, then waits mid‑air — half guardian, half witness.

The edges of the tub feel slick beneath my fingers. My arms shiver from the cold that sits inside the warm.

I don’t remember coming here. Not the walk, not the reason. Only fragments: sharpness, sound drowning itself, reflection splitting too many ways.

“Did I fall?” The question hisses, absurd even whispered.

There’s a note resting on the closed toilet lid, folded triangular. I can’t remember leaving it.

Reaching for it means standing. The effort costs rivers of will.

Inside the paper, the ink has bled slightly, old‑rain patterning across the letters.

*Don’t panic.*

*You put yourself here.*

Handwriting — mine, or close enough the distinction ceases to matter.

The words calm me more than they should.

I sink back, eyes fixed on the spider’s wobbling thread. It climbs precisely three inches, stops like it’s timing heartbeat against gravity.

The house breathes again, audible now, slow and deep: a submarine in the quiet ocean that used to be air.

***

I don’t know if I’m bleeding, or if the color in the water only pretends significance. My body feels both lighter and farther away.

The reflection in the metal drain gathers light into shapes. For a second I swear I see my face there — miniature, content, whispering something back up at me.

The words distort through liquid but I catch the rhythm: *You’re almost through.*

Through what, though?

The question drifts; I’m too tired to chase it.

Outside the bathroom door, faint knocking resumes — slower now, patient, timed with my pulse.

The ceiling spider retracts its thread completely, hiding itself in shadow. The watcher leaving only absence.

I lay my head against porcelain and close my eyes.

Water grips every inch of skin with heavy gentleness.

Some part of me believes this is rebirth. The rest knows better.

If someone opens that door tomorrow, tell them I was still listening.

Tell them the house was breathing, not me.

***