Bearer of Truth
Misdirection (Notebook Page)
What is a story?
People think a story is a life. Something practical. Something coherent. But most lives aren’t coherent when you’re inside them. They only look clean when someone else holds the timeline in their hands and edits out the parts that don’t make sense.
To me, a story starts with three introductions: a place, a time, and a plot. And inside those three things—whether it wants to be there or not—there is always a character.
So I’ll start mine the truest way I know how: close to the truth.
I am like misdirection, not because I want to deceive you, but because some truths don’t survive being stared at too long. I learned early that the world is full of people who love the shape of truth but hate its weight. They want a headline. They want a villain. They want a hero they can digest and forget.
I don’t fit into that kind of mouth.
I’ve always felt passive in a world forever changing—like I’m standing still while the scenery rushes by, like I’m older than time but still treated like a child the moment I speak. My face tells on me. My silence tells on me. And if I say, “I’ve seen things,” people hear ego instead of fear.
They don’t understand that seeing is not a gift. Sometimes it’s a bruise.
I was born where you’re reading this from—this world, this version, this “original.” It can be cruel. It can be healing. Both at the same time. I know what it means to be a colored male and get reminded of it by strangers, by systems, by rooms that go cold when you enter. Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes it’s a hand on your shoulder that’s too heavy. Sometimes it’s laughter. Sometimes it’s the way you’re always expected to prove you deserve air.
But I’ve been to worlds where it is much worse. And I’ve been to worlds where it’s the opposite.
That’s the part that sounds like fiction, so people treat it like fiction. They call it imagination because imagination is safer than admitting the universe has more doors than we were taught.
Scientists have theories about worlds beyond the “original.” Yogis talk about barriers. Some people touch the glass. Some press their forehead to it and swear they felt something press back.
Me?
I didn’t touch the barrier. I grew up with the feeling that it was already cracked.
Parallel worlds, people say. But “parallel” makes it sound like train tracks—two lines running forever, never touching. I don’t believe it’s like that. I think these worlds are possibilities—branches of what the original could become, depending on choices, laws, accidents, and forces we don’t name because naming gives them permission.
I have been a lot of things in those possibilities. God. Demon. Slave. King. Monster. Nothing at all. I have been rich and poor and non‑existing. I have been human in places where humans don’t exist. I’ve seen lives where magic and immortals and supernatural martial arts shift the very cosmos like it’s a curtain.
If that sounds like a show, good. Fiction is the only language people accept for the borderlands.
But this isn’t a story about fiction.
This is a story about what happens when something from the borderlands decides you’re not supposed to look anymore.
Because there was a time when my sight was wide—too wide—and I didn’t know it. I didn’t know there was a window in me.
And then, one summer night, when I was fourteen years old, I went to sleep like I always did…
…and the window closed.
Not gently. Not like someone lowering blinds.
Like something with hands. Like something that meant it
