Aliens nearby

They say the first real proof won’t come from a telescope or a radio signal. It’ll come the way a mugger comes: sudden, personal, and impossible to ignore.
Imagine you’re alone in your kitchen at 3:17 a.m., barefoot, eating cereal straight from the box because sleep has abandoned you again. The only light is the weak blue glow from the open fridge. You hear the faint click of the back door you swore you locked. You turn, expecting the cat, maybe a raccoon, anything with fur and bad manners.
Instead there’s a shape in the doorway that makes your brain stall. Too tall, too thin, joints bending the wrong way like a praying mantis that decided to stand up and ruin your life. The skin (if it’s skin) drinks the light instead of reflecting it, matte black shot through with slow-moving veins of cold starlight. No face you can recognize, just a smooth oval where features should be, except for two wet obsidian eyes that are way too large and way too calm.
It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t need to. You feel the question pressed directly into the soft meat of your thoughts: May we borrow this body for a while?
That’s how most abductions actually start, according to the ones who come back able to talk about it. Not bright lights and anal probes (those stories are the nervous system trying to translate something it has no vocabulary for). The truth is quieter. They step into your house like they already own the deed. They ask permission the way a tsunami asks the beach.
Some people say yes. Curiosity, boredom, the seductive promise that someone out there finally understands how lonely you’ve been. Those are the ones who vanish clean. No struggle, no screams. Just an empty cereal bowl on the counter and milk souring in the fridge.
The ones who say no… well, they still leave. They just remember more. They come back with star maps burned behind their eyelids and a new fear of wide-open night skies. They learn that “alien” isn’t a species. It’s a job title. There are tourists, refugees, anthropologists, priests, criminals, all wearing the same borrowed silhouette because it scares us just the right amount.
And somewhere out past the heliopause, there’s a version of Earth that already happened. A museum exhibit under glass. Our cities frozen at the moment we lit up the planet like a jackpot. Little audio loops of our radio voices leaking out into space: Hitler speaking to a crowd in 1938, a Beatles concert in ’64, the first “I love you” ever sent by cell phone. They play it for their children the way we take kids to see dinosaur bones.
Proof that we were here. Proof that we burned bright and fast and loud.
So when you look up at the stars tonight, don’t bother waving. They already have your picture. The question isn’t whether they’re out there.
The question is which one of us answers the door when they knock again.