They Swore Nothing Was Wrong With Me Then My Shadow Started Doing Things I Wasn’t Doing
They swore nothing was wrong with me.
Doctors said my tests were clean. Church leaders said my spirit was fine. Family members told me I was imagining things. Everyone repeated the same sentence until it lost meaning: “You are okay.”
That was before my shadow stopped obeying me.
At first, it was subtle. A delay. I would raise my arm, and my shadow followed a heartbeat later. I blamed the light, exhaustion, stress anything normal. Anything that didn’t suggest something was watching me from inside my own body.
One evening, sitting on my bed, I noticed my shadow tilt its head toward the door while I stayed completely still. My chest tightened. The room was silent. When I flicked on the light, the shadow snapped back into place like nothing had happened.
That night, I dreamed of a mirror that showed only my shadow smiling without me. From that moment, things escalated. My shadow began moving first. It stretched when I didn’t. Turned when my body refused to.
Once, while I knelt to pray, my shadow stood upright behind me, taller than me, arms wide as if claiming the room. When I told people, they didn’t panic. They pitied me. That was worse.
