Museum “Burning in My Nose”

“Closing my eyes doesn't bring the relief it should.

It has been months since I saw it, months since that dream. But though I close my eyes, I see the image of it, pressed against my eyelids. It fades with time, but every time I close my eyes again it is there again, locking me out of my mind as I process over and over the sight of it.

I just want to sleep again, but I am so scared of seeing it in my dreams.

Every time I do, I feel a little bit more burdened, a little more damaged. It is not the kind of thing you can see often without it hurting you, and though I have tried to reach out to doctors, there is no one who is willing or able to help.

It is simply a psychological condition, an act of self hypnosis or psychosis brought on by too much stress and the repetition of action to create a behavior or an imprint.

An imprint.

That is what it is.

It is an imprint on the back of my eyelids, like the flash you get when staring at a bright light for too long.

It lingers like it shouldn't, and I want it to stop so badly, but I don't how.

How do you stop something, once it has walked across your brain.

How do I get rid of the smell of burning in my nose?”

The recording that I had received I will try to make available, but I have been struggling to convert the file into something I can share. It was sent to me as a CD, but has refused to so far be converted into MP3 or any other format, though there are people at the museum who have experience with such complications and so I will be directing them to work on it.

When I was little I developed an interest in space.

At first it was just the normal sort of things that you would expect, like wanting to be an astronaut or wishing to go to the moon or mars. Stuff like that, images of it, used to take up large amounts of time, as I would pour over books and records. But as time passed my interests returned to earth, and specifically to Wellington Street.

It is strange how over time we can begin to see our lives as being a continuum, a sort of lingering sequence that suggests a change over time, while also showing us the pathways that we have followed throughout our lives. These subjects and ideas I think might just be a thing of nature, as I cannot remember a time when I wasn't interested in the strange and the odd.

As I got older, that interest in space would fade into the background, but every once in a while my interests would return, and I would begin learning about whatever strange happening and discovery was going on, whatever weird and odd sort of thing was being observed and cataloged. Something that was suggesting that the universe may just have become a little more stranger.

Now I look up at the night sky, and I wonder how it is all connected to the things going on down here. So many people have been talking about strange objects in space, and the weird positions of the moon and other bodies. Eric dreams about the sun going away, and this thing, this glow keeps on popping up.

It is a being that seems to have come up before, as it is found in recorded history, but the issue is that a file wasn't started on it until shortly before I arrived. Whomever made the display for the museum may be to blame for this, as the mentioning may be inspiring these stories to come to light, but it feels like something else.

It feels like this thing exists throughout history, and yet something that pervasive you would imagine would have been noticed before. It feels almost like this thing was hidden, that the history of its presence was retreated, and has only become known truly within the last year or so.

Either that, or maybe this thing wasn't here before. It is a being that appears outside of linear mention, so perhaps it really has only now appeared, and it is the story that is catching up, finding a place for it in the broader scope of events, because it requires a space if it is to make sense.

Maybe this all sounds nuts. I admit that I have been under great strain lately, so maybe I am simply looking for patterns, looking for something to organize and find a place for.

The other night I was closing up when I heard a knock at the front of the museum. I figured by the time I got there that the person would have left, but to my surprise they were still there when I arrived. I talked to them through the door at first, not really trusting someone who would come to the museum at night.

It was Niomi, my coworker.

As far as I could tell she had been sleepwalking as she was in her pajamas and had no shoes on. After a short while I brought her inside and we talked for a few hours while her parents came over to come pick her up.

She says that she has been dreaming about...well, maybe I should just show you.

“The last few nights I have been waking up in strange places, somehow managing to get out of the house no matter what I do to keep myself restrained. I know the idea of being strapped down when you sleep seems strange, but one of the times I found myself in the Wellington Street graveyard, almost fully over the fence that leads into the sinkhole.

I didn't used to sleepwalk. It is new.

But lately I have been dreaming about monsters, just like always, but there is something about them that is always different. I know how these things are supposed to act. I know how they are supposed to talk and move and what they look like.

But when I dream of them, they are malformed and shifting.

All of them are like that, except for one.

I dream about (redacted).”

Her parents arrived then and took her home.

She hasn't been back to work in a few days.