Fear in a Split Second: The Dominoes of an Ordinary Day

I can’t stop thinking about the timing of it all.

How every small, ordinary choice I made yesterday quietly stacked itself into the exact moment where everything changed — like dominoes lined up long before I knew they were there.

After work, I stopped at the post office.

Then I realized I didn’t have my purse, so I went home.

While I was there, I let Murphy out.

I needed to go to two stores, and I chose the order I’d visit them in.

Once I found what I needed, I lingered — roughly fifteen minutes — to see if anything else caught my eye before checking out.

Those minutes mattered.

Because when I finally walked up to the register at Ulta at The Mall at Greece Ridge, I was standing in direct line with the front doors. I was getting my receipt when we first heard it — the noise outside. Not clear yet, but wrong. Loud. Chaotic. The kind of sound that tightens your chest before your brain has time to interpret it.

Then a woman ran into the store.

She slammed both doors shut behind her — urgently, dramatically — and ran like she was fleeing for her life. There was no mistaking the fear in her movement.

And in that split second — before facts, before context, before reason — my mind went somewhere dark and very current. Given the temperature of this country right now, my first thought was ICE.

That fear wasn’t rational or irrational. It was reflexive. A product of the moment we’re living in, where sudden chaos and people running for safety have become frighteningly familiar.

Before I could think any further, everyone was running.

Employees moved us quickly to the back of the store, through narrow storage hallways, out an exit I didn’t even know existed. There was no conversation, no explanation — just motion. Follow. Go. Now.

Outside, nothing felt resolved.

My car wasn’t there. Instead, there were three security guards holding a man down on the ground. And then the police — everywhere. Car after car after car, sirens screaming, lights flashing, sound colliding with confusion.

And that’s where another layer of fear hit.

Because my history with involuntary hospitalizations has left deep marks on my nervous system. Police presence — especially in numbers — is a serious trigger for me. Sirens, in particular, don’t just register as noise. They pull me straight back into moments where I was restrained, monitored, watched — moments where my autonomy felt stripped away.

So as dozens of police cars sped past me, it wasn’t just the present I was trying to navigate. My body was reacting to the past, too.

I didn’t know if the danger was over.

I didn’t know which direction was safe.

I didn’t know where I was supposed to go.

I only knew my body had taken over.

Survival mode.

Tunnel vision.

One clear instinct repeating: get far away from here.

I remember walking, then stopping. Walking again. Trying to orient myself in a place that suddenly felt unfamiliar. Trying to decide which direction would put the most distance between me and whatever was still unfolding.

Later, we learned more. Police said this was an isolated stabbing involving two 17-year-olds who knew each other. One was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. The other was taken into custody. Officials said there was no ongoing threat to the public.

But that information came after.

In the moment, none of it existed yet.

Fear doesn’t wait for facts.

It arrives first.

And the body follows.

What keeps echoing for me now is not just the fear itself, but how close we all are — all the time — to moments we never plan to live through. How one different choice, one skipped stop, one shorter pause, and I wouldn’t have been standing there at all.

Closing Reflection: The Body Remembers

What this experience has reminded me is that safety isn’t just a thought — it’s a felt state. And when that sense of safety is suddenly disrupted, the body reacts faster than language ever could.

Even now, knowing I’m safe, I can feel where this moment lives in me. In my shoulders. In my breath. In how easily sound startles me. My nervous system did exactly what it was designed to do: it protected me first and asked questions later.

There is nothing weak about that.

For those of us who carry past trauma — especially medical or institutional trauma — moments like this don’t arrive alone. They bring echoes. They stack sensation on sensation until the present moment is crowded with history.

Healing, I’m learning, isn’t about erasing those responses. It’s about noticing them. Naming them. Letting the body slowly relearn that this moment is different from the ones that came before.

I’m safe. But I’m still shaken.

And I’m holding compassion for everyone touched by this — the teens involved, their families, the workers who acted quickly, and all of us who walked out carrying something invisible but heavy.

We move through our days believing in their ordinariness — until a single moment reminds us how fragile that assumption really is. And maybe awareness doesn’t come from avoiding those moments, but from listening closely to what they leave behind.