The Weight of the Morning

The first time I felt it, I was living in a cramped apartment above a laundromat, the kind where the dryers never quite finished their job and the air always smelled of fabric softener and damp wool. My bedroom was a narrow slit of a room with a single window that faced a brick wall, so I kept the curtains drawn and relied on a lamp with a broken shade for light. I’d been there for three months, long enough to know the rhythm of the building: the thump of the washing machines below, the occasional shriek of a pipe, the footsteps of the tenant above who never seemed to sleep. But that morning, something else joined the chorus.

I woke to the sensation of being watched. At first, I thought it was the usual paranoia that comes with living alone, but the feeling was too specific, too heavy. It pressed against the back of my neck like a hand. I lay still, my eyes squeezed shut, trying to convince myself it was just my imagination, a leftover from a dream I couldn’t remember. But the air in the room had changed. It was denser, as if something had filled the spaces between the furniture. I felt a shift on the mattress, a subtle dip beside me, like a heavy body settling in. My breath caught. I tried to move, but my limbs felt weighted, as if I were underwater.

Then came the arms. They wrapped around me from behind, thick and cold, pressing me against a chest that was too broad and too still. I could feel the faint rise and fall of breathing against my back, but it was ragged, irregular, like a bellows with a leak. My heart hammered. I tried to speak, to ask who was there, but my voice came out as a whisper, swallowed by the pressing silence. The arms tightened, and a voice, low and gravelly, said, ‘Shh, go back to sleep.’ The words were meant to soothe, but they only made my blood run colder.

It had happened once before, two weeks prior. I’d woken in the same way, felt the same weight, the same cold arms. But that time, I’d been too frightened to respond. I’d simply closed my eyes and prayed for it to pass, and after what felt like an eternity, the pressure lifted, and I was alone. This time, I was determined to understand. I forced myself to speak, though my voice shook. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ The arms didn’t loosen. Instead, the voice returned, clearer this time, and it said my name: ‘Maren, go back to sleep.’ My blood turned to ice. How did it know my name?

In my previous encounter, I had read about such entities, the kind that attach to people, feeding on their fear. People online said to talk to them, to try to establish communication, to ask for their names. So, as the cold seeped into my bones and the breathing continued in my ear, I forced myself to relax. I closed my eyes and whispered, ‘I’m not afraid. Tell me your name.’ There was a long pause, and I felt the arms tighten, then loosen. The voice came again, but this time it sounded almost sad. ‘You used to call me. Every night. You’d whisper my name into the dark.’ My mind raced. I couldn’t remember. My life had been full of forgotten things—old friends, old lovers, old dreams. But a name?

I thought back to the advice I’d been given: to repeat his name over and over, to invite him in. I had done that, foolishly, in the quiet of my room, after reading a post about contacting spirits. I had picked a name at random, a name from a book I’d read years ago: Elias. I had said it aloud, three times, as a joke. And now, here he was, holding me, telling me to sleep. But I didn’t want to sleep. I wanted him to leave.

‘Elias,’ I said, my voice barely above a whisper. The arms around me stiffened. The breathing stopped. Then, slowly, the pressure lifted. The mattress rose. I heard the creak of the bedframe as he stood. I turned onto my back, expecting to see a shadow, a shape, anything. But the room was empty. The lamp flickered, casting shifting shapes on the wall. My phone showed the time: 3:33 a.m. I was alone, but I knew he was still there, somewhere in the dark, waiting.

I never slept that night. As the sun crept through the gap in the curtains, I lay awake, listening to the sounds of the building waking up. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had opened a door. The next morning, I found a small, stone figure on my nightstand, a crude carving of a man with its arms crossed over its chest. I hadn’t seen it before, and I certainly hadn’t bought it. I picked it up. It was cold, and lighter than it should have been. When I turned it over, there was a name scratched into the base: ‘Elias.’ I dropped it, and it shattered on the floor. But I knew, even then, that some things can’t be broken so easily.

I moved out a week later. I left the figure behind, or what was left of it, in a box of trash. But the weight of that morning stayed with me, a phantom limb of fear. Sometimes, in the quiet of my new apartment, I still feel a dip in the mattress, a cold breath on my neck. And I hear a voice, soft and patient, saying my name, asking me to go back to sleep. But I never do.

I can’t. Not anymore.