Blue Light, Black Water

Suzi’s Secrets #33: A Short Story

A moment suspended between distraction and truth. The blue glow of a screen reflecting everything she’s trying not to feel.

The silence was unbearable, so she filled it with light. Blue light. Endless light. Anything to keep the noise inside her head at bay. 

Ivy told herself it was normal. Everyone scrolled. They did it while the kettle warmed, while the laundry spun, while the elevator climbed toward a meeting they didn’t want to attend. It was modern life. It was the price of being reachable. It was what you did when you had a few spare minutes. She scrolled because if she stopped, her mind got too loud.

Her mind would rise up, not gently, like steam from a mug. Intrusively,  like a flood through a cracked dam: old scenes, sharp words, unfinished conversations, dreams she’d buried under invoices and to-do lists, swirling in a confusing mix with all the things that bothered her going on in the world and even things she wanted in her life. And it came with images that didn’t belong to her life as she’d built it: a door in a stone wall, a fire that didn’t burn, a horse made of starlight that looked at her with human intelligence.

It was too much. It was overwhelming and having something tangible to concentrate on kept her mind quieter. So she scrolled. She trained her brain to seek the numbness. And her thumb moved automatically over her screen providing an endless river of other people’s lives pouring over her own thoughts until her own softened into manageable static.

Her phone was warm in her hand, the way a small animal warmed a palm. The screen was bright and obedient, offering her what she wanted: distraction with the seductive promise of relief. Randomly, her phone would do something strange. Not all the time. Not enough to be obvious. Just enough to make her stomach tighten when it happened, because the timing always felt… deliberate.

Like a finger tapping her shoulder.

Like the universe clearing its throat.

It started a few months ago, in the parking lot of the grocery store. Ivy had been in her car with a list on her lap, reading it for the third time because it was easier than going inside. She had an appointment after, a call, and then dinner to make, and the day felt too full for a cart and fluorescent lighting and the gentle violence of a crowded aisle. She’d opened her phone, aimed for mindless comfort, and the screen had stuttered.

Once.

Twice.

Then the video she was watching froze on a single frame: a woman mid-laugh, mouth open, eyes bright, so vivid it looked like a photograph, and the audio dropped into silence. Ivy had tapped the screen. Swiped. Closed and reopened. Nothing.

A small warning flashed at the top:

LOW STORAGE. FREE UP SPACE.

She’d deleted two things at random, an old screenshot and a memo. The screen resumed as if nothing had happened. Except the way Ivy’s heart kept beating too quickly, like her body had been startled awake. 

It happened again later that day when her mother called. Ivy saw the name light up—Mom—and felt the familiar tightening in her chest, a reflex that lived beneath her ribs like a bruise she never admitted was there. The phone rang. Ivy stared. She didn’t answer. She never answered on the first ring. She waited until the second or third, so she could pretend she’d been busy, so she could put a little distance between herself and the expectation of being available.

She tried to answer when her phone glitch-clicked in her hand. She pressed the green button to answer the call and nothing happened. Then the screen went black.

For a split second, Ivy saw herself in the reflection: eyes too tired, mouth pressed into a line.

Behind her, in the rearview mirror, the parking lot looked gray and flat and ordinary. Then the screen flickered back to life. The call ended, without ever being answered.

MISSED CALL: MOM

Ivy stared, half offended. Half relieved. She told herself it was a service issue. A software update. Some annoying thing she’d fix later. Later never came. Later was a promise she made to herself the way she made promises to drink more water, to stretch, to go to bed earlier. Later was a distraction, too.

More and more, the phone did little things. Little weird things; not give her a text message, black screens, powering down without her direction and while still having battery. I’ll get a new phone, she thought. Certainly it was due to her phone’s age.

Now, on a Friday night in December with the world wrapped in cold darkness and the smell of cinnamon lingering in the kitchen from a candle she’d lit and forgotten, Ivy sat on her couch and did what she always did.

She scrolled.

Outside, the wind pressed against the windows. It rattled the branches of the bare tree in the courtyard like someone gently scratching on the glass. A neighbor’s dog barked once, then fell silent. Somewhere on the other side of the building, Christmas music thumped faintly. Someone else’s life pressing forward with rhythm.

Ivy’s apartment was tidy in a way that made it feel like no one lived there. The counters were clear, the throw pillows arranged like props. Even her blankets were folded, draped over the arm of the couch in a casual curve that looked effortless but wasn’t. Effortlessness was one of Ivy’s specialties. Ivy had built a life that looked good from the outside. A small online business. A following. A steady stream of orders. A calendar full enough to justify her exhaustion, but not so full that people would accuse her of overworking.

She was “doing well.” That phrase followed her like a ghost. She was doing well, but she felt like she was always bracing for something. Like joy was a floor that could drop out from under her at any moment, and she had learned to stand with her knees slightly bent, ready for impact. Her phone offered her something safer than impact. Something she could control.

Flick. Flick. Flick.

A recipe video. A girl holding up a planner. A couple kissing under fairy lights. Someone dancing in their kitchen like it was the only place they’d ever been loved.

Ivy smiled at nothing, not because she was happy, but because the muscle remembered what to do when presented with a pleasant image.

Flick.

The screen froze. Ivy’s thumb stopped mid-swipe. A thin line of static shimmered across the bottom of the display, like the edge of a wave. Then the video vanished entirely. The screen went black. In the reflection, Ivy saw the outline of her own face, pale against the room. Her eyes were too bright in the darkness. For a moment, she thought she saw something else behind her, a movement, a shadow, but when she blinked, it was just the window and the tree and the trembling branch.

The phone flashed back on, but instead of her feed, an old photo appeared. Ivy’s stomach dropped. It was a picture she hadn’t seen in years. A photo from a cheap disposable camera, grainy and yellowed, taken at a birthday party when she was maybe nine. Her hair was pulled back too tight, her smile strained. In the background, just out of focus, a man’s hand rested on the back of her chair.

Her father’s hand. Ivy’s breath caught like she’d swallowed a shard of ice. She hadn’t looked at that photo since she moved out. She wasn’t even sure it was saved anywhere. She had deleted old albums, wiped cloud storage, purged her devices like a woman trying to cleanse a house haunted by memories.

And yet there it was.

Her phone blinked again. The photo was replaced with a simple text note. Black letters on a white background, stark as bone.

STOP RUNNING.

Ivy’s fingers went numb. Her skin prickled. She tried to exit the note. Swiped. Pressed the home button. Nothing. The phone vibrated once, hard enough to buzz against her palm like a heartbeat. Another line appeared beneath the first.

TURN OFF THE LIGHT.

Ivy stared. Her throat tightened, the way it did when she’d held back tears too long. This was impossible. It was a glitch. It was a virus. It was – Her mind scrambled for an explanation that didn’t require her to believe in the thing she’d spent her whole life refusing to name. 

Ivy flung the phone onto the couch cushion beside her like it had burned her. It landed silently, face up, the note still on the screen, bright as a dare. The room suddenly felt too quiet. The candle in the kitchen flickered. A small flame, steady but alive, casting shadows that moved with the air. Ivy’s pulse pounded in her ears.

Turn off the light.

She laughed, a short, sharp sound that didn’t match the fear in her body. 

“No,” she whispered, as if refusing a person.

She reached for the remote and turned on the TV.  Sound burst into the room, relief. The sound of laughter and a familiar theme song, the bright noise filled the space and softened the edges of her fear. Ivy exhaled as if she’d been underwater.

The note on her phone remained. Ivy didn’t look at it. She stared at the TV and let the noise wash over her. For ten minutes, she pretended she hadn’t seen anything.

For ten minutes, she pretended she didn’t feel the shape of that old photo in her chest like a bruise being pressed.

For ten minutes, she tried to believe the world was only what she could see, hear, measure, explain.

But her body didn’t believe that. Her body never had. She could feel it, something under her skin, a humming awareness that had always been there, the way you could feel the ocean long before you saw it. A sense that the air contained more than oxygen and dust. That silence wasn’t empty, just unoccupied by noise. On the TV, someone cried dramatically over a misunderstanding. The laugh track followed like a trained animal.

Ivy couldn’t breathe. She stood abruptly and paced to the kitchen, as if movement could outrun the feeling rising in her. The candle sat on the counter, wax pooled around the wick like melted gold. The scent was warm: cinnamon, clove, something like orange peel. Ivy stared at the flame. It was small, but it held its space with quiet authority. The candle didn’t apologize for existing. It didn’t ask permission to burn. Ivy’s phone buzzed again, from the couch. A single insistent vibration.

Ivy froze.

She didn’t want to go back. She didn’t want to look. The part of her that lived in survival mode wanted to shut everything down, bury her phone under a pillow, turn the volume up on the tv and drown the room in someone else’s story. But another part of her, small, persistent, pressed forward like a hand against the inside of her ribs. It was the part of her that used to know things.

When she was a kid, Ivy had known things before they happened. She’d known when her father’s mood would shift, when the air in the house would turn sharp, when the door would slam and her mother’s voice would go quiet. She’d known which rooms to avoid, which topics to steer away from, which tone to use to keep everyone calm.

People had called her “sensitive.” Her mother used the word like a complaint. “Ivy’s just sensitive,” she’d say to strangers, with a tight smile. “She takes everything so personally.”

Sensitive. As if sensing was a flaw. As if reading a room like a book was something to be ashamed of. Ivy grew up and taught herself to stop sensing. Or rather, she taught herself to ignore it. She built walls in her mind and filled the gaps with lists and schedules and the constant hum of productivity.

If she was busy, she didn’t have to feel.

If she was scrolling, she didn’t have to remember.

If she kept the light on, she didn’t have to see what lived in the dark. Her phone buzzed again. Ivy turned off the TV.

The sudden silence was a punch. She stood still, hand hovering over the counter, and listened to her own breath. The apartment felt different without the show’s artificial laughter. The air had weight. 

The candle flame leaned, then steadied. Ivy walked back to the couch like she was approaching a sleeping animal that might bite. Her phone lay where she’d thrown it, screen still lit. The note was gone. Now the screen showed her lock screen photo: a simple image of a sunrise over water. It was something calming, something she’d chosen to represent peace.

Her finger trembled as she picked the phone up. It was warm. She unlocked it. Her feed returned as if nothing had happened.

No photo. No note. No warning.

Ivy stared, and the anger came fast on the heels of fear. “Oh, so now you’re fine,” she muttered as she slammed the phone face down on the cushion and pressed her palms to her eyes. When she lowered her hands, she noticed something she hadn’t before: a faint ache behind her sternum, like pressure building in a place she’d kept sealed. 

She swallowed. The ache didn’t go away. The candle’s scent drifted into the room. Cinnamon. Warmth. A memory of holidays she couldn’t quite touch. Ivy looked at the phone again, face down, as if it might flip itself over.

She didn’t want to be crazy.

She didn’t want to be the kind of woman who thought her phone was delivering messages from

the universe. She also couldn’t deny what she’d seen.

Stop running.

Turn off the light.

If it was a glitch, it was a cruel one.

If it wasn’t…

Ivy’s heart thudded. She closed her eyes. And immediately, the internal noise rose. The kind she’d been feeding blue light to starve. Images surged behind her eyelids: her father’s hand on that chair; her own small fingers gripping the edge of a bedspread; a door closing; the smell of whiskey; her mother’s voice saying, “Don’t make him mad tonight.”

Ivy’s eyes snapped open. Her breath came shallow. Her body was flooded with the same old instinct: escape.

Her gaze darted to the phone, to the easy relief it offered. She could scroll. She could drown it. She could… The candle flame flickered again, a small disturbance like a wink. Ivy stood and walked to her bedroom. If she stayed in the living room, she’d give in. She knew it. The couch and the phone had a magnetic pull. The comfort was too addictive.

In her bedroom, the overhead light was on. Bright. Sterile. Safe.

Ivy stared at the switch on the wall. Her stomach twisted.

Turn off the light.

She could refuse. She could turn off the light and prove to herself this was nonsense. But the truth was, the light had always been a kind of refusal. She slept with it on for years as a child. First a nightlight, then a lamp, then the hallway light left cracked open like a promise that someone could hear her if she called out. It was an empty self vow ,though. No one ever came when she called. Still, the light had made her feel less alone in the dark. Now, as an adult with locks on her doors and control over her own space, she still turned lights on. She didn’t even notice. Light was her default. Light was her denial. Her fingers brushed the switch.

She hesitated.

Then she clicked it off. Darkness slid into the room like velvet. The faint glow from the streetlight outside painted pale lines across her curtains. The candle in the kitchen threw a weak, warm pulse from under the bedroom door. Ivy stood still, waiting for panic to rise. It did, of course. A quick flare, like a struck match. Her chest tightened. Her skin prickled. But then… something else.

A presence.

The noise in her head didn’t vanish, but it shifted. It took shape. Like a room full of people who had been shouting suddenly turning to look at her as if she’d finally arrived.

Ivy’s breath hitched as she felt it, the current within that she had always pretended didn’t exist. A current, steady as a river under ice. In the dark, she could feel her own mind like a living landscape.

Her phone buzzed in the living room. Distraction calling.

Once.

Then again.

Ivy didn’t move. Distraction, or maybe another note she didn’t write.

Another buzz.

Her pulse jumped, but she stayed where she was, feet planted on the carpet, hands clenched at her sides. The phone buzzed again, then fell silent. In the quiet, Ivy heard something she hadn’t heard in a long time.

Her own voice. Not the voice she used on calls, bright and efficient. Not the voice she used with friends, careful and agreeable. Not the voice she used with her mother, soft and placating. Her real voice. It rose in her chest like a bell being struck.

Enough.

Ivy swallowed hard. The darkness didn’t feel like a threat now. It felt like a mirror. She sat on the edge of her bed and pressed her hand to her heart, right over that ache. It pulsed beneath her palm, not painful exactly, just insistent. She closed her eyes again, because she had turned off the light and she had survived, and maybe—just maybe—she could survive this too.

The noise surged, but Ivy didn’t run. She let herself see it in flashes, like scenes in a film:

Her father, towering in the doorway, filling it with shadow.Her mother’s eyes avoiding Ivy’s as if looking directly at her would be too much to bear.Ivy learning early that peace was something she had to manufacture, like a potion: a smile here, a joke there, a perfectly timed apology for something she hadn’t done.

The memories came fast, overlapping, like a tv in between channels, unable to focus on a single one. Ivy’s throat burned. Tears rose, hot and unwelcome.Her hand tightened over her chest.

Stop running.

The words flashed in her mind. Not on a screen this time. Her voice. Ivy opened her eyes. In the faint light from the hall, she saw her desk in the corner. A notebook sat there, half hidden beneath a stack of unopened mail.

She hadn’t written in years. Once, when she was a teenager, writing had been her escape. She used to write constantly; stories, fragments, poems, lists of the life she wanted and a few things to be thankful for, that she gripped like a lifeline. She used to fill pages with imagined worlds because her real one was too heavy. 

Her mother had found one of her notebooks once. She’d flipped through it with a frown.

“This is… strange,” she’d said. “Why can’t you just write about normal things?”

Ivy had stopped writing after that. She looked at the notebook now, and something in her shifted. She stood, walked to the desk, and pulled the notebook free. It was dusty at the edges. The cover was plain. Ivy sat, pen in hand, and stared at the blank page like it was a door. 

In the living room, her phone buzzed again. Ivy didn’t get up. She clicked the pen open. Her hand trembled. She didn’t know what to write. She didn’t know where to start. There was too much. So she wrote the simplest truth she could find:

I don’t know how to be quiet.

The words looked stark on the page. Ivy stared at them and felt a sob rise in her chest, a sound she swallowed down out of habit. She wrote again:

There’s too much noise.

Her phone buzzed. Again, twice in quick succession. Ivy ignored it. The candle scent drifted under the door, warm and steady. She wrote:

It overwhelms.

Tears spilled down her cheeks silently, like her body had been waiting for permission. Ivy wiped her face with the heel of her hand, annoyed at herself for crying, then annoyed at herself for being annoyed. Her phone buzzed again, a frantic tremor.

Ivy almost stood to check it, reflex kicking in. She wrote the next thing that felt true, even if it was ugly:

I learned to disappear.

Her chest ached. The pen scratched again:

I forgot writing was cathartic.

Her throat tightened, and for a second, she almost reached for the phone simply to escape the feeling. Instead, she wrote:

I wish I didn’t feel like I needed to disappear, still. Why is it still so hard?

The sentence sat there, heavy with possibility. Ivy stared at it, breath held, nearly expecting words to answer her. The room was silent except for the soft hum of the heater and the distant city sounds beyond the window.

No screaming. No slammed doors. No footsteps approaching.

Just her.

Ivy’s phone buzzed again. This time, the sound was closer, louder, as if it had somehow moved

closer to her. Ivy frowned. That was impossible. She stood and walked toward the living room, notebook still open in her hands like a shield. The phone was exactly where she’d left it.

Face down. She flipped it over. The screen was lit. Another note:

YOU ARE NOT NINE ANYMORE.

Ivy’s breath caught. Her hands shook. She stared at the words as if they might dissolve. A new line appeared:

YOU ARE SAFE ENOUGH TO REMEMBER.

Ivy’s mouth went dry. Her eyes stung. She swallowed. She looked around the room as if someone might be hiding behind the curtains, typing these messages. The apartment was empty. The candle flame leaned toward her like it was listening.

Ivy’s phone vibrated once, then went still. The note remained, bright and calm. Ivy sank onto the couch slowly, notebook in her lap, phone in her hand. She stared at the note.

YOU ARE SAFE ENOUGH TO REMEMBER.

Ivy’s mind scrambled for an explanation for her phone’s erratic behavior. Maybe it was her older brother sending these messages. They hadn’t talked in years. He hadn’t come to her father’s funeral. She didn’t want to remember, but what was the cost of avoiding? She’d paid for it in missed moments. In nights she couldn’t remember because they’d been spent in a haze of other people’s content. In relationships that felt shallow because she couldn’t bear to be fully present. In a constant low-grade exhaustion from living like her own mind was an enemy.

Ivy looked down at her notebook.

I don’t want to disappear anymore.

The words looked like a door. Her phone buzzed again. A notification popped up, a familiar social app reminding her of something she’d saved, some “collection” of videos she was “meaning to watch.” The timing made her laugh, bitter and sharp.

The universe had a sense of humor, apparently.

The screen flickered. The notification vanished. The note remained. Ivy held the phone in both hands, feeling its weight.

She thought about her thumb. How it moved automatically. How easily she could open an app and drown.

She thought about the dark bedroom. The quiet. The way the silence had felt like presence rather than absence.

She thought about the note and the way it nearly felt like an invitation.

Ivy’s fingers tightened around the phone. Her heart thudded.

She could turn it off.

She could keep it on.

She could throw it across the room.

Ivy set the phone down on the coffee table. Just set it down. A small act, a big choice. Ivy breathed in. The candle scent filled her lungs. She breathed out. The room didn’t collapse. The silence didn’t swallow her whole. The noise in her head rose, but Ivy didn’t reach for blue light to smother it. Clearly something was wrong with her phone.

Instead, she opened her notebook again. Her pen hovered. Her thoughts were loud, yes. Chaotic, yes. But beneath them, she could still feel that something else, like a steady drumbeat under the frantic clatter. A knowing. Ivy wrote:

If I stop running, what happens?

The pen paused.

Another line:

What if the truth doesn’t destroy me?

She stared at that one for a long time.

The candle flame flickered, then steadied. The wind outside eased for a moment, as if holding its breath with her. Ivy’s phone sat on the table, quiet.

For a minute—two—the room felt like a threshold. Like she was standing at the edge of something

that could change her life, not in an instant, but in slow deliberate steps. Her mind tried to bargain. Just five minutes of scrolling, it whispered. Just to calm down. It offered her comfort like a drug. Ivy looked at the phone. She didn’t pick it up.

She looked back at the notebook.

Ivy exhaled slowly. She felt it, a tiny release.

Her phone remained on the table, dark and still. The notebook lay open in her lap, pages waiting. Ivy’s thumb twitched as if remembering a habit. Her pen rested lightly between her fingers as if remembering a different one. Outside, the wind pressed against the window again, but the glass held. The candle flame burned steadily. In the silence, Ivy could hear her own heart.

Loud. Alive.

For the first time in a long time, she didn’t know what she would choose next.

But she knew it was her choice.

She reached—slowly—toward the coffee table.

Her fingers hovered above the phone.

She paused.

Then moved toward the notebook.

A question rattled through her mind:

Do you want to keep numbing, or do you want your life back?

In the hush of her apartment, between the flicker of flame and the dark glass of her phone, Ivy breathed.

Once. Twice.

I’ll get a new phone tomorrow.