NEURODIVERGENT NARRATIVES - CHAPTER 9: IT'S A MYSTERY

The Moment Before.

There is a particular quiet that settles just before a boundary trembles. It gathers at the edge of your attention like a change in air pressure, a soft tightening of the world around you. You feel it first in the body, in that old familiar vigilance, long before any sound reaches the door. It is the pause you learned to hold as a child, the one that made sense when interruptions were not just interruptions but small collapses of safety. The quiet remembers even when you have tried to forget.

And yet there is something else inside that hush, something steadier. The knowledge that every unexpected approach carries its own question, its own possibility. Not every knock means danger. Not every summons asks you to shrink. In this moment you stand between the life you have built and whatever waits on the other side, hearing the echo of all the times you opened the door too quickly or not at all. This chapter rests in that threshold with you, where fear and curiosity circle the same silence.