Reader Submission | I Can See That Ring, But the Moment I Say So, People Forget

(This is an anonymous reader submission. Its contents have not been verified.)

I don't know whether this will survive. I have written this kind of thing many times, saved it to my phone, put it in a notebook; a few days later the words are still there, but the "point" is gone—as though something had quietly faded the few words that mattered most.

What I want to talk about is a ring.

It floats in mid-air: over intersections, over temple roofs, between tower blocks. A circle with a small piece missing, broken at a certain spot, as though a very fine knife had gone through it. It does not glow, it makes no sound, it is simply there. I look up and I see it.

The problem is that nobody else does.

I pointed it out to a friend; he followed my hand, looked, and said "there's nothing there". I took photographs; the photographs show clean sky. I changed cameras, changed modes, still nothing. But when I look with my own eyes—it is there the whole time.

After that I switched to other methods. Video: I recorded 3 minutes, and on playback that stretch of sky was clean as if someone had wiped it. The audio is stranger. The first half is my voice, getting as far as "above the intersection there's a", then 11 seconds of room tone, then my own voice saying "never mind". I don't remember saying never mind.

I arranged for a classmate to look with me, lined up the direction, counted to three, and we both raised our heads. He looked for a long time, then lowered his head and asked what I had just been saying. I told him again, he looked up again, and asked the same thing again. The third time I said nothing.

A different angle: I dictated and let him write it down. Halfway through he stopped, the nib still pressed to the paper, and looked up at me: "Where had you got to?" I have kept that sheet. This is all that is on it:

Above the intersection, about 3 storeys up, there is a

After that it is blank. His handwriting is neat, and only the last stroke drags out long, like a hand that stopped there and never finished.

For a while I badly wanted to give up. Nothing was stopping me; as long as I said nothing, my days would look like everybody else's. I tried two weeks of not looking up, walking with my eyes on the pavement tiles. I lasted 9 days. On the tenth, waiting at a red light, I looked up anyway, and it was on the roof of the building across the road. I measured that distance on a map afterwards: about 80 metres. I move, it moves, and that number hardly changes.

The stranger thing is that every time I try to talk about it "seriously", halfway through the sentence the other person's face goes blank for a moment, and then they change the subject as though they had not heard. They do not disbelieve me. That one sentence seems never to have got into their ears at all.

Later, among my grandmother's things, I found an old bronze mirror. There is a pattern cast into the back—a circle with a piece missing, broken in exactly the place the one I see every day is broken.

While she was alive my grandmother said one thing that I did not understand then and think of every day now: Don't be afraid. But don't tell.

I am putting this out with nothing to prove. I only want to know—if you can see that circle with a piece missing too, and if you have found that the harder you try to say it, the less it will come out…

then you are not the only one.