This is what I need to tell you

This is what I need to tell you is an ARG interactive piece created through a Forum thread, in which the latter’s author goes through a mental breakdown, incl. a paranoia and dissociative episode. In wanting to share critical information, the author find himself fighting another (himself?). Reading as an unsettling struggle to have the final word.

The thread contains 6 posts, of which all but one has been edited at least once. At first glance, it seems like the edits were made by a collected person, covering a distressing period that should not have been shared, and urging others to disregard the original messages. Still, another voice peers through, with an agitated final edit, pleading to be heard. A starting knotted thread that unravels when diving into the edits.

This second voice, on edge due to an unspecified event or revelation (proof of which is linked through a dead link), attempts to fight at every turn the more calm and serious speaker, who, in turn, rebuffs those messages for their presumably harmful content (for whom? the author? other readers? we’ll never know).
The layers in the conversations, through the multiple original posts and then their subsequent edits, is fascinating and bone chilling. You have to comb through all the edits and rearrange their order to piece out things. Yet, it stops before we learn what the author wants to tell us, as the information is deleted even before being shared. And it leaves so much hanging about the state of the author - the final post feels forced and the final edit cold, brushing off the thread to be of any importance.

What we are left is a chilling and concerning exchange (in a good way, knowing it isn’t real), and a bunch of unanswered questions (will the truth every come out? was there one to begin with? is the author ok? will we ever know?). And a very interesting use of the medium to share this story.