Phantom Convulsions

It starts gently—like a setting sun, a tingling drift uncoiling in my abdomen, tracing meticulous pathways through my frame. It slithers into my mind, a weight both foreign and familiar, a harbinger of past collapses, whispering peril in the language of ghosts. A whisper becomes a tremor, becomes a howl. The cold vacuum yawns wide, swallowing every lucid thought. The world outside disintegrates into shadow. Fear is no longer a possibility—it is law. Rational thought fractures, splintering beneath its weight. I am hunted— by echoes, by specters, by the certainty of failure. A thousand past mistakes resurface, each one carved into my skin. My heart pounds, hammering dread into my ribs, a steady cadence of self-inflicted peril. I drift—untethered, lost in a space with no end, caught in a current I cannot fight, dragged by a tide I cannot name. I have strayed from the path. My only armor is retreat, a desperate crawl into the deepest alcoves of my mind. I search for anchors, for proof of the real, but terror clings to me, thick as tar— a parasitic thing feeding on certainty, swallowing past and present whole. Damn, it’s painful. I question the steps that led me here, the fractured frame of my own making. I am reduced to a child— small, breakable, locked in combat with invisible horrors as they claw their way from the abstract into the marrow of my bones.