Mira had always known the feeling. It crept in like a shadow stretching across the floor—quiet, slow, and impossible to ignore. It didn’t knock when it came. It never did.
Tonight, it sat at the edge of her bed.
The room was silent except for the low hum of her air purifier, but her heart thudded like a drum in an empty theater. She stared at the ceiling, blanket pulled to her chin, every muscle tight.
“Go away,” she whispered into the dark.
The visitor said nothing, but she felt it watching. It wasn’t a monster, not really. Not claws or teeth or ghostly wails. Just weight. Invisible, but heavy. A pressure behind her eyes, in her chest, wrapped tight around her ribs.
She tried the breathing exercises her therapist taught her. In through the nose. Hold. Out through the mouth. Again. Again. But the rhythm was broken by the thought: What if it never leaves this time?
The visitor leaned closer.
It whispered all the worst-case scenarios, fed her flashes of panic dressed as memories and future disasters. She tried to reason with it, to drown it out with logic. But logic didn’t speak its language.
Still, Mira reached for her journal on the nightstand. With trembling fingers, she wrote:
I am not my thoughts. I am not my fear. This will pass.
The visitor shifted. A flicker of hesitation.
She wrote again.
I’ve survived every bad day so far. I can breathe. I can wait.
It didn’t vanish, but it stepped back, just a little. Enough for Mira to inhale fully. Enough to feel the fabric of her blanket. The softness. The now.
Eventually, the visitor would leave. It always did, even if it came back again and again.
Mira didn’t sleep much that night, but she stayed. She endured. And in the morning, she was still here.
Still standing.
Still fighting.
Still her.
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