I didn\u2019t notice it right away. It wasn\u2019t until I caught my reflection later that morning that something felt\u2026 off. There, just beneath my ear, stretching down my neck, were dark, uneven marks I knew hadn\u2019t been there before. At first, I laughed it off, assuming I had slept in a weird position or maybe scratched myself without realizing. But the more I looked, the less it made sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The night before had been completely normal\u2014or at least, that\u2019s how I remembered it. I went to bed like always, nothing unusual, nothing out of place. No injuries, no accidents. And yet, here I was, staring at something that looked deliberate, almost like it had appeared overnight without warning. That\u2019s when the uneasy feeling started creeping in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I tried to ignore it, covering it up and going about my day, but people noticed. A glance here, a second look there. One friend finally asked if I was okay, and I brushed it off with a joke. But inside, I couldn\u2019t shake the thought that something wasn\u2019t right. These weren\u2019t just random marks\u2014they had a pattern, a shape that made it feel like there was more to it than I understood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the time I got home, I couldn\u2019t ignore it anymore. I started replaying everything in my head, every moment from the night before, trying to find something\u2014anything\u2014that explained it. But there was nothing. Just a blank space where an answer should have been. And somehow, that made it worse than knowing the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now every time I look in the mirror, I see more than just those marks. I see a question I still can\u2019t answer. Because sometimes, it\u2019s not what you see that unsettles you\u2026 it\u2019s what you don\u2019t remember.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I didn\u2019t notice it right away. It wasn\u2019t until I caught my reflection later that morning that something felt\u2026 off. There, just beneath my ear, stretching down… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3087,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10219"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10220,"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10219\/revisions\/10220"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsreflections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}