Feb 23rd, 2024.

I didn’t sleep last night.

Not properly, anyway.

I lay in bed until about four in the morning with every light on, which is apparently what a brave thirty-one-year-old man does after discovering a possible alien spacecraft in the woods. He curls up under a duvet, watches the ceiling like it owes him money, and jumps every time the boiler makes a noise.

Alfie slept fine, obviously.

Traitor.

He was snoring at the end of the bed like he hadn’t spent the evening barking at what may or may not be the greatest scientific discovery in human history. I kept looking at him, hoping he’d suddenly sit up, stare into the corner, and give me some kind of useful dog-based confirmation that I wasn’t losing my mind.

He did not.

He farted once.

That was his contribution.

I called in sick to work this morning. I used the classic “stomach bug” excuse, because no one asks follow-up questions when you imply fluids are involved. My manager replied with a thumbs-up emoji, which somehow felt colder than any actual words could have been.

For a while, I told myself I wasn’t going back.

That would have been the sensible thing.

Find possible alien ship in woods. Leave possible alien ship in woods. Continue existing in miserable but technically stable life. Make beans on toast. Watch something forgettable. Pretend the universe is small enough to fit inside your direct debit schedule.

But the problem with seeing something impossible is that the possible becomes unbearable afterwards.

The flat looked different today. Smaller. Meaner. The mould above the bathroom window seemed more accusatory than usual. The pile of unopened letters by the door looked like evidence of a civilisation in decline. Even my laptop, sitting on the kitchen table with its little blinking cursor, seemed to be saying: So? Are you going to keep pretending?

By lunchtime, I had packed a bag.

Torch. Spare batteries. Water. Phone charger. Notebook. A cheese sandwich I made with the grim focus of a soldier preparing rations. I also took a kitchen knife, because apparently my survival plan against advanced extraterrestrial technology was cutlery.

I’m aware this does not reflect well on me.

At about six, I put Alfie’s harness on.

He immediately hid behind the sofa.

That should have been my second warning. The first warning was, of course, everything about the situation.

“Come on, mate,” I said, trying to sound confident.

He gave me a look that very clearly said: Absolutely not, you lanky idiot.

I went without him.

That felt wrong the moment I closed the door. Alfie and I have an unspoken agreement: I provide food, shelter, and unnecessary emotional complexity; he provides company, judgement, and occasional ankle warmth. Walking without him made the world feel improperly rendered, like a video game before the textures load.

The woods were damp from rain. The paths were slick, the air full of that rich, fungal smell you only get when nature is quietly digesting itself. Usually I like that smell. Tonight, it felt less charming. More like the forest was chewing.

I followed the same route as yesterday, or tried to. In daylight, the path is ordinary enough: mud, brambles, dog mess, the odd abandoned vape. At dusk, it turns into something else. The trees lean in. Every bird sounds sarcastic. Every snapped twig becomes a full legal argument for going home.

About twenty minutes in, my ears popped again.

I stopped dead.

There it was.

That faint pressure, like the air had developed intent.

The motorway hum thinned behind me. Not faded. Thinned. Like someone was turning down a volume knob on the whole world. The birds went quiet next. Then the wind. Then the sound of my own boots seemed to arrive late, as though the ground was taking a moment to decide whether to accept them.

I nearly turned back.

I really did.

Then I thought about work. About the office lights and the grey carpet and the way everyone says “living the dream” when what they mean is “I am spiritually decomposing in real time.”

So I kept walking.

The clearing appeared before I expected it.

And the ship was still there.

I’m calling it a ship because I don’t know what else to call it. Object sounds too vague. Craft sounds too much like I’ve started wearing tinfoil and shouting at radio masts. Vessel feels dramatic, and I’m trying very hard not to become dramatic, despite all available evidence.

It sat between the trees exactly as before, low and smooth and wrong.

Not wrong as in ugly. Wrong as in it did not appear to have been designed by anything that had ever filled in a tax return. It had no obvious seams, no windows, no door, no engine, no little flashing lights like films promised us. Its surface shifted as I looked at it, colours moving beneath the metal like oil on water: green, violet, gold, blue, then something else I don’t think I have a name for.

The glow was warmer this time.

Not brighter. Warmer.

I stood there for maybe five full minutes, which is a long time when your body is repeatedly suggesting evacuation.

Then I said, “Hello?”

Because of course I did.

Because apparently when presented with an unknowable intelligence from beyond Earth, I become every useless bloke in every horror film who walks into the basement and says, “Is anyone there?”

Nothing happened.

I took one step forward.

The air tightened.

Not physically, exactly. More like the feeling when you walk into a room where people have just been talking about you.

I stopped.

Then something moved across the surface of the ship.

A line of light. Thin. Deliberate. It travelled from one end to the other, paused near the centre, and widened into a shape.

Not a door.

A symbol.

Three circles connected by a vertical line.

I know that sounds basic. I drew it in my notebook as soon as I got back, before it could rearrange itself in my memory. It looked almost childish, like something a kid might draw if asked to invent a logo for the moon. But when I saw it there, glowing on the side of that thing, I felt something shift behind my ribs.

Recognition.

Which is impossible, obviously.

You can’t recognise something you’ve never seen before.

Unless you have.

Unless some part of you has been waiting for it.

I took another step.

This time, the ship answered.

Not with sound.

With memory.

I was suddenly standing in my childhood garden.

Not actually. I knew I was still in the clearing. I could feel the mud under my boots and the cold air on my hands. But at the same time, I was six years old, barefoot on wet grass, looking up at the night sky while my dad smoked by the back door.

I had forgotten that moment completely.

He was younger than I am now. That’s the bit that nearly broke me. In my head, my dad has always been Dad: tired, stern, unreachable, made of work boots and silence. But there he was, not much more than a lad himself, pretending to know how to be a father.

I heard myself ask him, “Do you think there are people up there?”

He took a drag from his cigarette and said, “If there are, let’s hope they’ve made a better job of it than us.”

Then the memory vanished.

I was back in the clearing, breathing hard, my face wet.

I don’t know when I started crying.

The ship pulsed once, soft yellow through the trees.

I should have run then. I should have absolutely legged it back to the flat, locked the door, deleted this blog, and taken up a normal hobby like jogging or silent resentment.

Instead, I said, “Did you do that?”

The symbol changed.

Three circles became two.

Then one.

Then none.

The surface smoothed again.

I don’t know what that means. Maybe it means yes. Maybe it means no. Maybe it means I was speaking to an interstellar toaster and embarrassing myself on behalf of the entire species.

Then came the really stupid part.

I touched it.

I know.

I know.

Trust me, no one is more disappointed in me than I am.

The surface wasn’t cold. It wasn’t hot either. It felt like touching skin through running water. Solid and liquid at once. My fingertips tingled, then my arm, then my teeth, which is a sensation I do not recommend.

The world went white.

Not blank. White like every colour had been folded together.

For a second — or an hour, or no time at all — I saw a planet.

Not Earth.

A wide red plain beneath a violet sky. Tall black structures rising from the ground like ribs. A sea that reflected two suns. Something vast moving under the surface of it. Not threatening. Just vast.

Then another image.

A city, but not like ours. No roads. No towers. Buildings grown in spirals, lit from within, wrapped around enormous trees. Figures moving through the air, not flying exactly, more like the air had agreed to hold them.

Then another.

Earth.

From above.

Small. Blue. Bruised with light.

I felt something then that I’m struggling to describe without sounding like I’ve joined a cult.

Sadness, maybe.

Not mine.

Or not only mine.

The kind of sadness you feel when you see someone you love making the same mistake over and over again, and all you can do is wait until they are ready to stop.

Then I was on the ground.

Mud in my mouth. Very dignified.

The ship was still there, humming now. A real hum this time, low and gentle, like a giant cat purring somewhere underground.

And beside my hand, lying in the mud, was something that had not been there before.

A small black stone.

At least, it looked like a stone. Smooth, oval, about the size of a conker. When I picked it up, it was warm. Too warm for something lying in February mud.

It had the same symbol on it.

Three circles. One line.

I put it in my pocket and ran.

Not heroically. Not cinematically. I ran like a man who has remembered he is mostly water and fear.

The motorway came back all at once. Birds. Wind. A plane overhead. The distant hiss of tyres on wet road. It was disgusting and beautiful and almost made me laugh.

When I got home, Alfie was waiting by the door.

He sniffed my pocket and immediately backed away.

The stone is on the kitchen table now.

It hasn’t moved.

I keep touching it. Not for long. Just briefly. Every time I do, I get the same sensation: pressure behind the eyes, warmth in the palm, and the faintest smell of pine trees after rain.

I don’t know what happens next.

I don’t know whether I’ve been chosen, infected, invited, scanned, adopted, or marked for collection.

But I know one thing.

That ship showed me something.

Not just other worlds. Not just memories.

It showed me that my life is not the whole map.

And I don’t know if that terrifies me or saves me.

Possibly both.

Alan Lean.

Poetic Catharsis.

Scary as it may be to bare my soul to the world through my poetry, it is most cathartic and genuinely helps me to understand my emotions more deeply. Quite often I’ll have an overwhelming cocktail of feelings that once put to paper, are much simpler and easier to categorise, and therefore deal with in a healthy way.