What Leo Wrote in His Diary

October 12, 2024

I feel compelled to write this down, to try, just once, to give it shape. People would call it a power. They’d assign it some clinical, sci-fi label like spatio-temporal travel, but it isn’t that. It has never been about travel; I can’t move through anything. It’s something simpler, and stranger. It is the ability to be present at an event. To listen. And it began with a dream that still resists language.

There were two points, like the peaks of distant, impossible mountains, and between them, a restless tide. Its waves moved in a hypnotic rhythm, mostly following their natural course until, without warning, one would leap from peak to peak. It was a violation of nature, and I felt each impossible jump in the marrow of my bones — a jarring harmony that was at once perfect and profoundly wrong. I would often wake trembling, drenched in a feverish sweat, sometimes finding myself standing on my bed with a silent scream trapped in my throat.

Then, one night, the dream changed. The tide and the mountains dissolved, and in their place stood a man. He didn’t speak at first, simply reached a hand toward me, beckoning. Fear rooted me to the spot.

“Are you afraid?” he asked. His voice was a placid lake in the chaos I had just endured, yet I couldn’t bring myself to trust it. I remained silent, but he seemed to understand. He knew I didn’t know his name.

“I am Leo,” he said, and the name echoed through the dreamscape as if it were my own. “I am here for you. Come. I will show you the way out.”

For a reason I cannot explain, I followed. I had no sense of dreaming or waking as he led me to a chamber with a single door. Beyond its frame was nothing but roiling smoke and drifting cloud. He opened it and gestured for me to look.

Two young women sat cross-legged on the floor, their laughter like soft bells in the haze. They shared a long pipe, from which a thin ribbon of white vapor rose to join the fog. One of them, a faint halo of red light pulsing above her head, turned and smiled at me — an expression both inviting and deeply unnerving.

“Come to us,” she said, her voice a gentle tide pulling me forward, but with an undertow of something sharp and cold. A sweet scent, like burning herbs, reached me, and a strange serenity settled over my soul. I stepped into the room, drawn closer until I stood before them. I remember no walls, no ceiling, no other presence. I leaned forward to take the pipe — though from whose hand, the one crowned in red or the one robed in white, I can no longer say.

And then I woke up.

I woke up, and some fundamental part of me had been altered. The world felt… porous. Thinner. That dream didn’t fade; it settled into my bones and left this strange gift in its wake. I still don’t know who the man was who shared my name, or what would have happened if I had truly smoked from that pipe. All I know is that since that night, I have been able to listen to the echoes of moments past, a silent guest in rooms I’ve never entered. The dream gave me the key to a door, and I have been looking through the keyhole ever since.