It starts the way it always does, A shift in the air so subtle that I almost convince myself I imagined it A whisper, not quite sound more like a thought pressed too close against my mind.
[Image source](Image by Jose Antonio Alba from Pixabay)
The feeling spreads slowly curling around my skin like mist seeping into my bones, I don’t flinch, I have felt it before. At first, it used to startle me the sudden weight of something unseen settling into the space beside me the way the air grows thick, charged as if something just moved but left no trace I remember the first time it happened when I was a child sitting alone in a quiet room my ears straining for a sound that wasn’t there The way the shadows deepened just slightly as if something had exhaled and pulled the light inward, Now it’s different, Now it’s familiar It comes when I’m alone always when I’m alone Sometimes in the dead of night when the world has fallen into that eerie unnatural silence the kind that presses against my eardrums making me feel like I’ve stepped outside of time. Other times it arrives in the quiet moments of the day slipping between blinks, between breaths, between the seconds I’m not paying attention, I have never seen it not truly But I have felt it, It brushes against me in ways that the living do not A pressure against my shoulder, a weight at the edge of my bed a presence lingering just beyond my vision And the strangest thing It doesn’t frighten me. Not anymore At times I think it’s watching, Other times I think it’s waiting. But for what, I do not know, I used to tell myself it was my mind playing tricks on me that it was nothing more than the workings of an overactive imagination But how do you explain the way the air turns cold in a room that was warm a moment before Or the way my name has been spoken softly almost lovingly when I am completely alone, It is not cruel It is not kind It simply is, And somehow in some strange, unspoken way I have come to accept it. Whatever it is wherever it lingers it has always been with me In the silence, in the shadows, in the spaces no one else notices, A familiar feeling An unseen presence. A whisper in the dark.