The first night I thought I'd left the television on.
I woke up at 3 AM — the way you wake up when something changes in a room, not with alarm but with the particular alertness of a body that knows the environment has shifted. The TV was on. Static. The old analog kind, the gray-white noise of a dead signal, which was unusual because my television is new and defaults to a menu screen when the signal drops.
I reached for the remote on the nightstand. Before I could pick it up, I saw the face.
It was in the static. I know how this sounds. I know the human brain is optimized for face recognition, that we see faces in clouds and wood grain and the patterns of leaves, that this is a feature of perception rather than evidence of anything external. I know this. I'm telling you it was not pareidolia. The face was distinct. It was centered in the screen, slightly forward in the depth of the static, the way a face appears through frosted glass — present, obscured, unmistakably a face.
I did not recognize it at first. I was half-asleep and the image was not crisp. I turned the TV off and went back to sleep and did not think about it much the next day.
It happened again the following night.
The same time. The same static. I was more awake the second time, and I sat up and looked at the screen for longer. The face was clearer, or I was more awake, or both. It was not moving. It was not speaking. It was simply looking at the camera — looking at me — with an expression I could not read clearly.
On the third night, I understood what I was looking at.
The face was mine. Not a mirror image — not the reflected face I was used to seeing, the one that reverses left and right. This was me as I actually appear to other people, which is subtly different and which I recognized with the particular dissonance of seeing a photograph of yourself and thinking is that really what I look like? The face was mine and it was older than me. Not dramatically older — maybe ten years, maybe fifteen. The same jaw, the same eyes, the same small scar on the left cheek that I got falling off a bike when I was nine.
Older. And the mouth was moving.
I have been watching it every night for a month. I have tried to document this in rational ways — camera recordings of the screen, audio, an electrician who came and found nothing wrong with the set, a friend who stayed over and saw nothing unusual before falling asleep and did not wake at 3 AM. It only works when I am alone and awake. It only works for me.
I have been reading lips for a month. I am not good at it and the static makes it worse, but I have been watching every night and writing down what I think I see and comparing the notes. I am fairly confident now about the first word, which appears to be don't. I am less confident about the second word. The third word I am fairly confident is back.
Don't. Something. Back.
Don't come back. This is what I've settled on. The face is older than me and it is looking directly at me and it is mouthing don't come back.
I don't know what this means. I don't know what I would be coming back from, or where, or what is on the other side of that. I don't know if the older face is warning me or asking me. The expression is not frightened. It is the expression of someone who has made a decision and is trying to ensure that the decision holds.
Last night, for the first time, the face did something new. In the final moments before I turned the TV off — before the static cut and the room went dark and I lay back down in the silence — the older version of me shook its head. Slowly. Once.
Don't come back.
I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this. I don't know what decision I'll be making, in ten years or fifteen, that I'm being told to avoid or to choose or to survive. I don't know if the television is a warning or a memory or something else entirely.
I just know that tonight at 3 AM the static will come on, and the face will be there, and I will sit in the dark trying to read the words that my own mouth is forming.
And I am becoming increasingly sure that I almost understand them.