My Earliest Memories

Some of my earliest memories are not memories of comfort, but of confusion.

The house itself was ordinary a small two-bedroom ranch with wood-paneled walls, the kind that held warmth even in the dark. It should have felt safe. Most nights, it did. I slept in my parents’ bed, close enough to hear their breathing, close enough to feel protected. Nothing about that room suggested danger or fear.

And yet, every night around two in the morning, I woke up.

There was no sound to wake me. No movement. I would open my eyes already aware that something had changed, that the room was no longer empty in the way it should have been.

In the doorway, framed by the familiar wood paneling, stood a man his body outlined in a soft green glow.

He never moved. Never spoke. He only watched.

The light wasn’t harsh or frightening. It didn’t flicker or pulse. It simply existed, steady and contained, as if it belonged to him rather than the room. When I noticed him and sat up, he vanished instantly. No fading. No retreat. One moment he was there, and the next he wasn’t.

My parents never woke.

I would sit there in the darkness, listening to their breathing, trying to understand how something so present could leave no trace. How it could stand so close and yet disturb nothing else.

Night after night, the pattern repeated.

Wake up. See him. Sit up. Watch him disappear.

At first, I wasn’t afraid.

What I felt was something quieter and harder to explain a need to understand. Each morning, I carried the memory with me into the daylight. I tried to describe it. I searched for words that would make sense to adults, that would make them take me seriously.

I was always told the same thing.

“You were dreaming.”

At first, I wanted to believe that was true. It would have been easier. But the explanation never fit the experience. The dreams came at the same time every night. The image never changed. And unlike other dreams, this one didn’t dissolve when I woke up. It stayed sharp, intact, impossible to shake.

Being told it wasn’t real did something subtle but lasting.

I began to doubt myself. Not just the experience, but my own perception. If the people I trusted most were so certain I was wrong, then maybe I was. Maybe my imagination was dangerous. Maybe seeing things others couldn’t meant something was broken.

That doubt slowly turned curiosity into fear.

Not fear of the man in the doorway but fear of what it meant to see him.

Fear that I couldn’t trust my own mind.

Fear that noticing things made me different in a way I couldn’t explain or control.

Fear that believing something no one else acknowledged would leave me alone with it.

So I stopped asking.

I learned to keep the questions quiet. To carry the experiences inward instead of outward. To observe without speaking. That habit followed me into adulthood, shaping how I approached the world. I became someone who watched closely, who listened longer than I spoke, who trusted feeling before explanation.

The glowing figure never returned in the same way.

But the damage or the gift was already done.

That house taught me something I wouldn’t understand until much later: reality is not always shared, and being told something isn’t real doesn’t make it disappear. It only forces you to decide whether you trust yourself enough to keep believing it happened.

That was the first door.

It didn’t open with fear or excitement.

It opened with doubt.

And once that doubt took hold, it changed how I moved through the world how I loved, how I questioned, how I learned to stand in places where certainty didn’t exist.

I didn’t walk into the dark because I wanted to.

I walked into it because I had already been standing there, quietly, since childhood… waiting for someone to tell me I wasn’t imagining what I saw.