THE HYSTERISIS OF SELF

By: John Anthony Davis

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A mind is a fragile clock. His is broken, and now the past is stalking their future.

Architect Arron Vestein lives in a world of clean, precise lines. But his orderly life fractures the night he laughs at a joke made two minutes earlier. Then a kiss feels hollow—until its passion strikes him like a lightning bolt in the middle of a work meeting, leaving him in tears.

Arron is suffering from a terrifying, inexplicable condition: his emotions are arriving late. Love, anger, jealousy—all are echoes from days, sometimes years, in the past. To his partner Becca, a botanist who lives in the present, he is becoming a ghost haunting his own life—loving, arguing, and mourning moments she experienced days ago.

As Arron’s mind unravels, sliding deeper into a shattered mosaic of memory and invented moments, Becca fights to anchor him. She keeps logs, charts his emotional time-lags, and finally builds a desperate, beautiful fiction to give his fading consciousness a home: a painted red lighthouse on a blank white wall.

But the lag is accelerating. Arron is disappearing into the archives of his own mind. And Becca must decide: how do you hold on to a man who is already gone—and when do you let the ghost go?

A haunting, lyrical exploration of love, loss, and the terrifying fragility of time, perfect for readers of Flowers for Algernon and The Silent Patient. This is psychological horror of the most intimate kind—the horror of watching a soul dissolve, one memory at a time.