I hovered over the bed, torn between fear and curiosity. Every angle made the thing look worse: a swollen body, spidery limbs, something that clearly didn’t belong where I slept. I imagined it moving, crawling, multiplying. The more I tried to explain it, the less sense it made, and the more it felt like a scene from a horror film playing out in my own bedroom.

Only when I forced myself to look calmly did the truth appear. It wasn’t a monster, or an insect, or anything dangerous at all. It was a seed that had quietly begun to sprout, its “legs” nothing more than delicate roots searching for moisture. In the end, what had terrified me most was simply life, doing what it always does—growing silently in the dark, waiting to be noticed.