Lightning gnawed at the horizon all night, indifferent to your insomnia. You lay fetal, half-cocooned in a wool blanket, cradling an unread copy of Jung’s Man and His Symbols—its pages thumbed, spine exhausted, the way you preferred your books and most people. Rain raked the window with an urgency that seemed personal, and every few minutes gravity shifted beneath your bed, as if the apartment itself was unmoored.

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The Hat Man returned at 3:11 that morning, punctual as a grief counselor, but this time you greeted him out loud. “Do you ever sleep?” you said, or meant to say—what left your throat was a hiccuping, subaqueous version of the phrase, syllables snapping like bubble wrap in a black hole. The Hat Man idled at the foot of your bed, coat hem grazing the rug, the shadow of his hat projected so massively up the wall that it blotted out the usual drywall acne and thumb-sized scuffs. His face (absence) regarded you with an attention that made all other attentions feel like polite handshakes—so present, so internally illuminated, that you had the urge to shield your eyes.

You didn’t. Instead, you pulled the blanket off your mouth, exposing that traitorous jaw, and tried again. “What do you want?” It emerged clearer this time, a question tart with embarrassment: who begs answers from their own anthropomorphized abjection? The Hat Man vibrated, a microtremor that began in the brim and rippled down the entire silhouette into the floorboards. It was not laughter so much as the suggestion of an inside joke, one in which you were both the punchline and the audience.

The room brimmed, air compressed to a velvet hush. Even the radiator, mid-clank, aborted its complaint. “You’re a myth,” you whispered. “Urban legend. Internet tulpa. Nobody real shows up three nights in a row.” The Hat Man only tilted, a geometry of patience. He was waiting for you to cease your own rhetorical orbit, to ask the real question.

You forced the words through a mouth gone numb: “Why me?”

The answer was a dense pause. Then, in the way ghosts deliver soliloquies, a deluge of memory collapsed in on itself: every night spent cataloguing invisible threats, all the years of watching the closet door’s gap for impossible irises, the primal freeze in your stomach every time a window reflection doubled wrong at 2:11 a.m. All those moments you had cycled the universe’s worst-case answers, microdosing on dread like it was the only stimulus strong enough to cut through the neural fog.

You do not believe in me, the Hat Man vibrated into the walls, into the marrow of your shins. You believe only in what I rearrange inside you. His sentence did not detonate but rather overflowed, warm and slow as honey breached from a cracked comb.

You shrugged the blanket aside, sat up cross-legged, shivering not so much from cold as from the amphetaminic buzz of being seen by a calculus that outstripped human therapy by several orders of magnitude.

“You’re a coping mechanism,” you said, voice thin but steady. “A bullshit Jungian archetype. Fight, flight, fawn—”

The Hat Man completed the sentence without permission, collisionless and direct: Or freeze. Your specialty. The force of it nearly pinned you flat again, a single keystone memory waterfalling through the years—too young for words, clamped under a heavy, silent presence in a twin bed, wanting to vanish so badly that nothing else in the world had ever quite measured up. That old ache still lived in you, a maladaptive talent for absconding from your own life.

“But you’re not real,” you said, a protest so rote it bored even you. “You’re just a recursion. Like a screensaver for existential dread.”

The Hat Man’s hands—only now did you realize he had hands—emerged palm-out, long-fingered, gloved in umbral wool, as if to suggest a fragile offering or the hesitation before a magician’s reveal. The sense of anticipation doubled, tripled, until the air was so dense with want it nearly sang with it. The Hat Man did not touch you, but the force of his not-touch was as palpable as a migraine, a gravitational squeeze that shaped the contours of your heart and spine.

If you require proof, he murmured—not words, but the memory of words once chewed and spat by someone you used to love. Their voice hoarse with tenderness, asking: “Do you ever wish you could just blink out for a while, see what comes back?” The Hat Man reconstituted the longing in those syllables until you felt them on the back of your tongue, sweet and lethal as codeine. You fought the urge to curl in on yourself. “Okay,” you exhaled. “Let’s say you’re real. What now? You gonna eat my soul, or just file a report to whatever eldritch Yelp you answer to?”

The Hat Man’s shoulders shuddered—a shrug? A laugh?—and then he stepped forward, reality sloughing from his boots in parallax puddles.

As he advanced, the bedroom warped, walls pulling wide like taffy at the edges of sight until the only fixed point was the indent where your body made anxious mulch of the mattress. He didn’t so much move as reassign the laws of here and now, and with each step, a few more decades of your fear sloughed off your ribs and hit the floor with a noise like dropped dice.

You braced for contact, wild with the expectation of teeth, talons, some predatory endgame. Instead, the Hat Man paused at the bed’s edge, hands still splayed in odd benediction, and lowered himself until his absence-of-face aligned precisely with your eyes. Twin pupils in the glass of his hat brim reflected you back to yourself, as if to say: I am the only audience you will ever need.