The terror hit before I was even fully awake. One second I was drifting in the safety of sleep,

the next I was frozen, sure something was crawling on my back.

In the dark, every second stretched. Every sensation felt like a threat. Logic vanished.

All that remained was a single, pulsing thought: something is wron… Continues…

In the light of day, the story sounds almost ridiculous: a piece of dried chicken mistaken for something dangerous.

But in that dark room, half-asleep and alone with my thoughts, it felt real enough to trigger a full-body reaction.

My heart raced, my muscles tensed, and my mind filled in the gaps with the worst

possibilities it could imagine. That moment revealed how fragile our sense of safety can be,

and how quickly fear can rewrite reality. It wasn’t the object that mattered;

it was the story my brain built around it. The experience became a quiet reminder:

so much of what terrifies us lives not in the world itself, but in the shadows between what we know and what we fear might be true.