you blackout when you're eight years old and lose five minutes of your life, your memory. you open your eyes in a room with a faint blue hue, and a figure standing over you; bulbous head and large eyes, small mouth, a sickly frame. you think about the news and all of the ufo sightings your mother told you were just conspiracies, but you reach out and an alien takes your hand and pulls you up.

"you're okay, buddy," he says in a foreign tongue that you somehow understand. "it'll be our little secret."

our little secret, you remember, and you keep it to yourself for fifteen years, but try your hardest to reveal the truth behind closed doors.

you lose five minutes of your life and spend the rest of it wondering just what happened.

they say trauma takes a toll on the mind and various coping mechanisms include blocking and burying. you rack your brain and search and dig, but nothing makes sense. you remember the blue room and the alien that saved you, and before that, a childish dinner of lucky charms, but nothing in between.

it's not until you're 24, grown and providing for yourself and suffering from a fear of intimacy that you realize what you've buried. you foolishly believed in aliens and spent your teenage years researching their existence, hoping to find answers to your lifelong questions. you go back to that house, that house with the blue room, only to find that no one lives there anymore.

so you break a window and climb right in, sit on a couch that's all too familiar, but you don't remember being here. you blacked out for five minutes when you were eight years old and you think this house is the answer to your memory.

you step through the kitchen and this is the room, the room with the blue hue. lay down on the hardwood floor and look up; there are the cabinets and the golden handles that you remember. there, at the top of the refrigerator, is the dog shaped jar of cookies.

you close your eyes and try to remember, and suddenly you're eight years old again, laying on the ground with your clothes off. it's cold and there's blood drying around your nose and your glasses are crooked. the alien you thought you saw was never an alien, after all.

"you're okay, buddy," he says with a devious grin. he's shirtless and walking on cloud 9, bending down to lend you a hand. "it'll be our little secret."

you wake up screaming because everything you thought you knew was a lie. the aliens, the ufo's, they're just conspiracies. distractions from the truth, from the earth shattering revelation of what really happened.

they say trauma takes a toll on the mind and various coping mechanisms include blocking and burying. you searched, you dug, and nothing made sense because you got it all wrong; aliens don't exist but monsters do.

and he, the one who's secret you've kept, he's scarred you. he's stolen you from you. he reached for your hand as a peace offering. he stole your innocence, your virtue, and you never even knew. but it makes sense now, doesn't it?

you blacked out for five minutes when you were eight years old to try to forget, and you spent the rest of your life trying to remember. you shuddered at anyone's touch, never let anyone near you and you never knew why.

life was better when aliens existed but monsters, they feed on your ignorance, your innocence, your virtue. but those are gone now, and he can't hurt you anymore.