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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/um_marie_me on 2026-05-25 01:00:57+00:00.

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My mom has schizophrenia.

That’s the first thing everyone tells me to remember, so I’m putting it first here too.

I’m not sure it explains anything. I’m not. But if I don’t start there, people will skip the rest and ask the same questions anyway.

Did your mom ever see a psychiatrist?

Yes.

Was she medicated?

Sometimes.

Did she talk to people who weren’t there?

All the time.

That was the part of her illness I grew up around: the talking.

No screaming. No ranting. Nothing dramatic enough to make neighbors suspicious. Just this low, private murmur that came from behind closed doors, usually the bathroom door, while the shower fan hummed and the pipes knocked in the walls.

When I was little, I thought she was on the phone.

That made sense to me. Adults were always on the phone. My mom would disappear into the bathroom and I’d hear her voice go soft and careful, the way people sound when they’re saying something they don’t want heard.

Sometimes she’d laugh.

Sometimes she’d pause for a long time.

Sometimes she’d say, “No.”

No fear, no anger. Just firm.

No.

Then one day I walked into the kitchen while she was in the bathroom and saw her phone sitting on the counter beside a pile of oranges.

I remember that very clearly because one of the oranges had a soft green spot on it, and there was my mom’s phone, face-up, dead black screen. From the bathroom I could still hear her talking.

I stared at the phone for a long time.

Then I looked at the bathroom door.

Then I looked back at the phone.

I didn’t tell anyone.

Adults think children don’t notice things, but we notice everything. We just don’t have the language for it yet, so we file things away under broad categories like: Mom is tired. Mom is sad. Mom is talking to the bathroom again.

That last one became normal in our house.

She talked in the bathroom. She talked in the laundry room. She talked sometimes while washing dishes, her voice hidden under the water running. If my dad came home early or my sisters walked in, she stopped. If she noticed me watching, she would smile too fast and say, “What?”

Nothing, I’d say.

I was a quiet child. Everyone said so.

Teachers loved it at first. Quiet kids are easy to confuse with good kids. I didn’t interrupt. I didn’t ask for much. I could sit with my hands folded and my mouth closed so long that adults forgot I was there and said things around me they shouldn’t have.

My mom used to tell people I was “the peaceful one.”

I wasn’t peaceful. I was listening.

When you grow up in a house where something is always almost happening, quiet becomes a survival skill. I learned the tiny sounds that meant my dad was irritated. I learned the difference between cabinets being closed normally and cabinets being closed as a warning. I learned when my mom’s murmuring was casual and when it had that tight little wire running through it.

I also learned not to talk to myself.

This is where it gets stupid, and I know that.

Everybody talks to themselves.

People rehearse arguments in the car. People narrate recipes when they cook. People sing in the shower. There are studies about it, I think. There’s probably a very normal explanation for why humans fill empty rooms with their own voices.

But in my house, talking when nobody was there meant something else.

So I didn’t do it. Not even as a joke.

If I dropped something, I didn’t say “oops.” If I was looking for my keys, I didn’t mutter, where did I put them? If a song got stuck in my head, I kept it there.

My mouth became the one door in the house I could keep shut.

I’m telling you all this because three weeks ago, I heard my mother’s bathroom voice come out of my own mouth.

I moved into a small studio last year, the kind with gray fake-wood floors and a kitchen too narrow for two people to stand in unless one of them is okay being pressed against the fridge. My bathroom has no window. Just a fan that turns on with the light and makes an uneven clicking sound every few seconds.

I hate that fan. I hate the bathroom in general, honestly. Still, I had mostly gotten used to it.

Then, three weeks ago, I got home from work so exhausted I felt hollowed out. I dropped my bag by the door, kicked off my shoes, and stood in the kitchen for a while without turning on the light.

Eventually I took a shower. The water was too hot. The fan clicked. The pipes made that old knocking sound behind the tile, exactly like the pipes in my childhood home.

I was shampooing my hair when I heard someone say:

“Finally.”

I turned so fast I slipped and hit my shoulder against the wall.

The shower curtain stuck to my leg. Water ran into my eyes. For a second I couldn’t breathe.

No one was there.

Of course no one was there.

I live alone.

I turned off the water and stood there dripping, listening.

The fan clicked.

The pipes knocked.

My own breathing sounded embarrassingly loud.

I told myself I was tired. I told myself auditory hallucinations can happen when you’re stressed, or sleep deprived, or expecting them. I told myself a lot of things very quickly, all inside my head, because even then I didn’t want to speak.

Then my mouth opened. I didn’t decide to open it. It just did.

And in my voice, but not the voice I use with people, not even the voice I use when I’m alone and stub my toe and forget my own rules, I said:

“I’m here.”

I got out of the shower with shampoo still in my hair.

I didn’t sleep that night.

The next morning, I called my mom.

We don’t talk much. Not because I don’t love her. It’s complicated in the way families are complicated when love is present but not enough to fix anything.

She answered on the fourth ring.

“Hi, mija.”

She sounded normal. Tired, but normal.

I almost hung up.

Instead I asked, “When you used to talk in the bathroom, who were you talking to?”

The line went quiet. Not silent. But quiet. I could hear a television somewhere in the background and the soft scrape of her hand over the phone mic.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“You know what I mean.”

Another pause.

Then she laughed, but the laugh was too small.

“I was sick.”

“I know. But what did it feel like?”

“Mija—”

“Please.”

The television in the background kept talking. Someone in a commercial was very excited about a limited-time offer.

Finally my mom said, “It felt rude not to answer.”

I closed my eyes.

“What?”

“It would wait,” she said. “That was the worst part. It could wait for hours. Days, sometimes. But once I heard it, I knew it had been waiting.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It was easier in the bathroom,” she added.

“Why?”

“Because the water covered my voice.”

I wanted her to tell me something comforting after that. I wanted her to say she had been very sick then, that brains make patterns out of plumbing and loneliness, that I should call a doctor. I wanted her to become the adult in the room for once and hand me a normal explanation.

Instead she asked, very softly, “Has it started with you?”

I hung up.

I spent the rest of the day googling symptoms of schizophrenia.

I read about genetic risk. I read about onset ages. I read about auditory hallucinations, disorganized thinking, stress, trauma, sleep deprivation, delusions. I took three online screening quizzes even though every responsible website told me not to use them as diagnostic tools.

I made an appointment with a psychiatrist. The earliest available was six weeks out.

That night, I did not shower. The night after that, I didn’t shower either. By the third day my hair was greasy enough that I felt disgusting, so I stood outside the bathroom door for ten minutes with a towel under my arm like an idiot.

Then I turned on music from my phone. Not loud. Just loud enough to make the room feel occupied. I showered with the curtain half open and the bathroom door unlocked. I kept my eyes open when rinsing my face. I said nothing.

Nothing happened.

For almost a week, nothing happened.

When you’re scared something is wrong with you, you start to miss the symptom because at least the symptom gives shape to the fear. Without it, the fear spreads everywhere.

I started noticing how much everyone talks to themselves. My coworker whispered “come on, come on” at the printer. A woman in the grocery store sang one line of a song over and over while choosing tomatoes. My neighbor across the hall had entire conversations with his dog in a cartoon voice. On the bus, a man in a suit muttered numbers under his breath and tapped each finger against his thumb.

Normal things. Human things. Except they didn’t feel normal anymore.

I kept thinking about all the ways people invite something in without meaning to.

Singing in the shower. Talking through panic. Praying. Counting. Practicing a difficult conversation in the mirror. Leaving a voicemail to someone who won’t pick up. Saying “hello?” into an empty house because something fell in another room. Maybe we were never alone in those moments. Maybe we just assumed the voice that answered back was ours.

The second time happened in the kitchen.

I was chopping onions. The knife slipped, not badly, just enough to nick my finger. A bright red bead of blood rose up before I felt anything.

Without thinking, I said, “Shit.”

Then, from the hallway, something laughed. It was my laugh. Not a stranger’s laugh. Mine.

But flattened somehow, like it had been recorded on old tape and played through a wall.

I turned toward the hallway. There was nothing there.

My studio is small. From ...

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