I remember the way the air felt heavier as I approached, as if the whole garden were holding its breath with me. That familiar patch of soil, where I’d watched things grow and fade a hundred times, suddenly felt foreign. The object sat there like a secret, daring me to name it, daring me to decide whether to be afraid. My thoughts ran ahead of me, inventing quiet disasters in the dirt.
Later, after research and reassurance, the mystery shrank into something almost ordinary. It was just a fungus—strange, foul-smelling, but harmless. The threat had lived only in my mind, in the gap between what I knew and what I could not explain. That morning didn’t just give me an answer; it redrew the borders of my fear. I left the garden with the unsettling comfort that not everything unknown is dangerous, but it will always demand that we pay attention.
