The first night in my friend’s guest room, the irritation was a mere whisper. It was a single, solitary bump on my left forearm—small, pale, and easily dismissed as the byproduct of a stray mosquito or perhaps the physical manifestation of a long day’s travel. I brushed it off with the casual indifference of someone who believes their environment is under their control. But as the clock ticked toward the early hours of the second morning, that whisper turned into a low, rhythmic hum of discomfort.
The patterns began to emerge with a clinical, terrifying precision. They weren’t scattered randomly across my body like the haphazard bites of a common insect. Instead, they appeared in deliberate clusters, tracing the geography of my skin where it had pressed most firmly against the mattress: the curve of my shoulder, the small of my back, the underside of my thighs. Each bump was a tiny, raised welt, itching with a quiet persistence that felt less like a physical symptom and more like a signal. I lay there in the velvet darkness of the apartment, scratching absentmindedly, trying to convince myself that I was overreacting. My mind wanted to believe it was nothing, but my body was already screaming the truth.