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That was day one.

I barely remember going home and collapsing in bed. Something to do with shock, I guess. When I woke up the next day, it all seemed like some weird hallucination... Until I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror.

It was still there, floating on my forehead. Half of that weird complex squiggle. It looked less blurry; I think on some level I'd accepted everything, as much as I didn't want to or even know what it was, and that acceptance had filtered through to my mind.

I scrubbed at my face and just stare at myself for the longest time. What the hell was going on? What had the note in the book meant?

Who was looking for me? How would they find me? Did I want them to find me?

I didn't know anything... No, that's not true. I knew something. I knew things weren't what they seemed, that something was hiding beneath the skin of the world.

So I decided to look for it. The library had been where I'd found my first real clue, so I went back there. I started searching the books, flipping pages and looking with my left eye for anything out of the ordinary.

I searched history books, encyclopaedias, science books... Nothing. Just pages and pages of these complex geometric squiggles, except on the blank pages, where it was a relatively simple pattern.

I was sitting there at a research table, half a dozen different books open in front of me when I noticed it. They were all sitting on blank pages, with nearly identical patterns staring at my left eye when I realised... They were identical patterns.

Every one of the blank pages had the same symbol. I traced it carefully and double checked it and as far as I could see they were all identical. I grabbed a pen and a piece of paper, made sure no-one was watching me, and began tracing one of them carefully.

Most of the squiggles I'd seen were complex, like the one on my forehead. It kind of hurt to look at, like one of those patterns that no matter how much you zoom in is just more pattern. I realised as I thought and traced that other patterns had been less complex, like the symbols on street signs.

But the one on blank pages was the simplest I'd seen. It was like someone had traced the outline of a very square castle from above, with a couple of little indents. I'm pretty sure my tongue was sticking out with the effort of tracing the pattern, I'd never been an artist, but it wasn't too hard to just follow the lines through the paper.

I didn't know what to expect. My left eye was feeling sore from all the searching, so I was just using it to take peeks at the pattern, make sure I was following the line then trying to rest it while I followed what I could remember of the shape. I paused as I finally brought the line back towards the starting point, preparing to cause the loop.

I mean, this was crazy, right? What was going to happen? Would the page catch on fire? Would Morpheus suddenly show up and offer me the blue pill... The red pill? Whichever one made you wake up.

I licked my lips and pushed the pen those last few centimetres, closing the loop...

And it vanished.

I stared at the paper in shock for a second, when the symbol started to blur back into existence... As, I realised, I peeled open my left eye. I'd had it pressed shut to rest it. I slowly closed it again, looking at a blank page with my right eye.

Then I closed my right eye and slowly opened my left, only to stare at my traced symbol. I looked at the lines and I could see they weren't perfect, my straight lines looked more like only-slightly-curved lines, one even had a little bump where my elbow had slipped.

But it worked. I licked my lips as I reached out and wrote 'Hello' in the middle of the squiggle, then checked the sheet with both eyes. Under the view of the right eye, the word vanished, lost on the blank page.

I took a few minutes then, thinking, forming a plan. Or the start of a plan. Or the start of the start of a plan.

I ended up writing 'Hello, I am the one with one eye. The world is dim, but now I see it. I will look for you here.'. I pressed it into the back of the book on lenses, behind the page where I'd seen the original note. Then I put everything away and went home, still tired, still confused, but with just a tiny bit of hope.

That was the end of the second day.