The first bump didn’t scare me. It was small, easy to dismiss, the kind of irritation you blame on stress, dry air, or a stray mosquito that slipped in unnoticed. I noticed it absently while brushing my teeth, a faint raised spot on my forearm that barely registered as unusual. I had slept poorly the night before, and my mind was already crowded with small inconveniences, so it fit neatly into the category of things not worth worrying about. By the time I crawled back into bed that evening, I had already forgotten it.
But the second night changed the tone of everything. I woke up with more bumps, not randomly scattered, but arranged in subtle lines and clusters. They traced the outline of where my skin pressed into the mattress, following my shoulders, the backs of my arms, and along my upper back. They didn’t hurt, exactly. They itched just enough to demand attention, a persistent sensation that kept pulling me out of shallow sleep. Lying there in the dark, scratching without thinking, I tried to reason it away.
