#pinefiles

I still see them when I close my eyes.

Sleep has become…unreliable. Every time I let my guard down, the memories surface. The things I’ve witnessed, the anomalies I was never meant to survive. They linger at the edges of my mind like unfinished equations, unsolved and restless.

And yet…I’m still here.

Breathing. Standing. Defying the odds, as improbable as that may be. If nothing else, that must count for something, another variable in my favor. A chance to make amends. A chance to rebuild what was lost.

It’s been a long time since we were all under the same roof. Longer still since it felt like something resembling a family.

Even now, I find myself sharing space with my insufferable twin. Some constants, it seems, never change. But we’re talking again; really talking and that, against all logic, brings a strange kind of comfort.

The universe does not correct itself. It accumulates mistakes until they resemble design.

There’s something deeply unsettling about the way knowledge waits for you. Not in neat rows of books or tidy lecture halls, but in the margins, in the footnotes no one reads, in the diagrams that look almost correct until you stare too long.

The kind of knowledge that hums under your skin. the kind you don’t learn so much as uncover. I keep thinking about how every discovery feels less like progress and more like trespassing. like tonight dust in the air, lamplight flickering, pages spread across the desk in a language that shouldn’t make sense but does.

Symbols repeating in patterns that feel intentional. watchful. as if the act of decoding them is part of the design.

People love to romanticize curiosity. they call it brave, noble even. but they never talk about the moment it stops feeling like a choice. Because it does. it always does.

There’s a point where you realize you’re not chasing answers anymore, answers are pulling you in. every question branches into ten more, every theory opens a door you can’t quite close again. and suddenly your notes aren’t just notes, they’re…evidence. of something larger. something structured. Something that might already know you’re looking.

Turns out all it really needs is repetition. The same symbol appearing in unrelated books. The same phrase overheard from strangers who shouldn’t know it.

The same dream replaying with microscopic differences every night until you start waking up already anxious. You tell yourself it’s coincidence at first. Then pattern recognition. Then stress but eventually you reach the point where denial takes more effort than belief.

It was meant to make things more credible. footnotes, references, a proper trail of evidence something solid enough that anyone could follow the work and arrive at the same conclusions. that’s how you prove something matters. That it’s real.

So i started citing everything; books, papers, fragments of lectures i half remembered. I wrote them carefully at the bottom of each page, neat and precise, the way you’re supposed to. Titles underlined. authors listed. dates included. It looked convincing.

It felt convincing until i tried to find one again. Just to double-check a detail something small, something I was sure I’d read before. I went back through the stacks, through the archives, through every catalog i could access nothing. Not out of print, not restricted and not misplaced.

Just nonexistent. I thought i’d made a mistake. Misremembered the name, maybe. transposed a date. It happens but then i checked another citation and another and another.

They don’t lead anywhere not outside of this journal but inside they’re perfect. Every reference connects seamlessly, every source supports the next, building something airtight and complete. A network of information that explains itself so thoroughly it almost doesn’t need the outside world at all almost.

I tested it tonight. Followed one citation as far as it would go, page to page, note to note, until the handwriting began to change and the margins grew tighter and the language shifted. It didn’t feel like research anymore it felt like recursion. Like the work was folding in on itself, becoming its own source, its own proof.

Sometime late at night, when the moon bleeds a cold blue light across the clearing, I slip out into the pines surrounding the shack.

I lie on the hard, unwelcoming earth and stare upward, trying to understand how something as ordinary as these trees can feel so unnaturally bright.

The wind moves through them in hushed, uneven whispers, not random, not meaningless. I’ve tried to ignore it, to dismiss it as imagination, but the pattern lingers. It follows me.

Real answers are expensive. They cost sleep, time and years of dead ends. Half-finished theories scribbled into the margins of notebooks no one else will ever read. So when the solution appeared immediately perfectly formed, waiting for me at the end of a trail I barely remembered following.

I should have been suspicious. Instead, i felt relieved. That was my mistake because difficult truths make you work for them.