You noticed it first on Sundays.

Those long, slow afternoons where the light slants wrong through the blinds and the air smells like dust and something faintly metallic.

You'd be taking a shower while watching your hands move under the water, and suddenly, they wouldn't feel like yours....

You'd blink. It would stop. (But the water would keep running. And running. And running)

The doctor calls it dissociation.

Your mother calls it loneliness.

You don't call it anything.because the moment you try, your tounge sticks at the roof of your mouth like it's been glued there.like something doesn't want you to speak.

Here's the thing: Monsters are easy.Monsters have claws, shapes, teeth.

But what do you call the thing that isn't a thing at all. What if the creature isn't hiding inside the walls, but inside us.

Not watching, not hunting- just being?

A shape formed by every choice we didn't make, every truth we didn't face.

Maybe the scratching we hear at night is just the sound of ourselves, trying to get out..or worse, trying to be heard.

And maybe the real horror is that we've lived with it so long, we forgot it wasn't always there.