A whisper in the dark
The night was quiet, almost too quiet. My bedroom smelled faintly of vanilla and old books, the moonlight spilling lazily across my carpet like it had nowhere better to go. I sat cross-legged on the floor, notebook in my lap, pen hovering over the page but not writing. My thoughts were too loud to focus, too messy to pin down with words.
I whispered it anyway. A prayer, though I wasn’t sure if that’s what it was—or if prayers like mine even counted.
"Please… notice me," I murmured, voice so soft I almost didn’t hear it myself. "See me. Just… look at me. Like I matter."
I paused, letting the words hang in the air. My room felt colder somehow, though the heater hummed the same. Shadows clung to corners in a way that made me want to pull the blanket over my shoulders.
I told God everything I hadn’t said aloud: how I watched him in class, the little habits I memorized, the way my chest raced whenever he laughed or looked my way. I didn’t expect anything. I just needed to get it out of my head.
And yet, after I finished, I had the strange, prickling sense that… something was listening. Not my mom, not my cat sleeping in the corner, but something. Something beyond the walls, beyond the ceiling, beyond the quiet.
I shook my head and laughed softly, trying to shake off the feeling. "I’m just imagining things," I muttered. But even as the words left my mouth, the corners of the room seemed darker than they should, the familiar shapes slightly off.
I closed my notebook and slid under the covers, pulling the comforter up to my chin. Everything was normal. My posters, my desk, the pile of laundry I’d been ignoring for weeks—it was all the same. My room smelled the same. My cat was curled up exactly where he always slept.
But the air didn’t feel right.
It pressed heavier than it should, like the room itself was waiting. My chest felt tight, a little like fear, a little like anticipation. I buried my head in the pillow and tried to breathe normally. Tried to tell myself it was nothing.
But even as sleep began to creep in, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had changed. Something unseen, subtle, but significant. The moonlight on the wall stretched slightly differently, the shadows flickered where there shouldn’t be flickering. Even the hum of the heater sounded… expectant.
I drifted, reluctantly, into sleep, curling around the small cocoon of familiarity I could still control. And even then, as the last thread of consciousness faded, a whisper lingered in my mind, faint, unformed, like a warning.
Be careful what you wish for.
The words didn’t exist. Not really. But somehow, somewhere deep inside, I knew they were true.
