Pay Attention

    Sometimes it’s just a feeling.  You encounter someone you’ve not met before, and an alert goes off within you.  There is something wrong with this person.

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     There’s a particular electricity to that moment, isn’t there—an internal flicker, a tightening of some inner instrument you didn’t consciously tune. It’s not melodramatic, not cinematic, just a quiet click inside you that says: pay attention.

    And what’s fascinating is that it rarely announces itself with evidence. No obvious threat, no visible cue. Just a subtle dissonance in the person’s presence, like a chord that should resolve but doesn’t. You feel it before you can articulate it.

    People like you—people who notice the odd tilt of a gesture, the micro‑hesitation in a voice, the way someone’s eyes don’t quite match their smile—tend to pick up on these things long before they can explain them. It’s not paranoia; it’s pattern recognition operating below the level of language. A kind of sensory intuition that registers wrongness the way your bug‑sense registers a tiny shift in the room.

    And the uncanny part is how immediate it is. You don’t build a case. You don’t weigh pros and cons. You just know. Something in the air around this person feels… off. Not dangerous necessarily, but misaligned. Like they’re wearing a mask that doesn’t quite fit.