The messages are everywhere. You just have to look closely for them.

And I was obsessed with finding them. Everywhere I went in town, I seemed to find one. I had started a new job as a coffee shop barista, and I found them at the café, too. The messages were in the oddest places, too. They would be in the bathroom of the café or the employee breakroom. They would be on light poles downtown. I even began to find them in my personal spaces.

I saw messages in the halls of my apartment building. Then I found them in my bathroom. They were scrawled on the walls of my living room. Was I losing it? Was I hallucinating?

Spring had arrived and the days began to warm up. The sun shined brightly in the mornings, but I kept the curtains tightly shut. On a Monday morning, I woke and for the first time in days, looked at myself in the mirror. I screamed when I realized the messages were written on me. On my face, my hands, my chest.

Across my forearm, the message read, “AND HERE WE REST, ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE AND WAITING FOR DEATH.”

I called Charles, my police officer friend and he came over immediately. He found me curled in a ball in the corner, naked from the waist up.

“Holy shit,” I could hear him whisper.

He saw the messages on the walls. They were everywhere. He put me in his squad car and took me to the nearest psychiatric ward, where I find myself today. They have hospitalized me involuntarily, and I’m not sure when I’ll ever leave this place. I still see the messages everywhere, but they tell me I’m the one who’s writing them. But that’s the thing! I can’t remember doing it. I can’t wrap my head around what’s going on, and they say that’s part of my illness.

They say I’m the one who wrote the graffiti throughout town, too, but I am not facing criminal charges for it. The people of this small town pity me now more than anything. I don’t think I’ll ever get out of this hospital, and I sometimes doubt I want to. They say the messages don’t mean anything. It’s all the ravings of a madman, they say.

But this I’m not convinced of. There’s a pattern, and I can see the connections. The Fourth Turning is coming, and the beast will emerge, and the devil will sing. The winters will be lost in translation, and we’ll know that the meek have already inherited the earth. It’s all connected. Can’t you see that? Why am I the only one who sees it?

The End