My hands are moving before my brain authorizes them—fingers raking down my arms, nails dragging across skin with enough force to leave welts, the scratching frantic and rhythmic and completely involuntary. A pattern I recognize even through the panic: the same self-soothing mechanism my therapist had identified three years ago, the one she’d calleda maladaptive grounding techniqueand I’d calledthe only thing that reminds me I’m in my own body.
My fingernails find my thighs.
The hiss that escapes my teeth is immediate—sharp, involuntary, the sound of nerve endings that are already compromised screaming their protest. The constellation tattoos that wrap my upper thighs—fine lines of ink mapped over circular burn scars, each star a cartography of survival I’d commissioned to cover what cigarettes had left behind—are sensitive on the best days. Today, with my skin running hotfrom suppressant failure and my nervous system firing on every cylinder, touching them is like pressing a live wire to raw flesh.
Stop. Stop scratching. You’re not there. You’re in Sweetwater Falls. You’re in your apartment. You’re in your bed and the door is locked and they are three hundred miles away and they can’t?—
I can’t breathe.
The hyperventilation has me now—short, stacking gasps that don’t provide oxygen so much as simulate the motion of breathing without the actual function. My chest heaves. My ribs expand and contract in rapid-fire spasms that make the scar tissue along my torso pull with each cycle. The room is dark—the apartment’s single lamp isn’t on, the only illumination the blue-white glow of a streetlight filtering through cheap blinds—and the darkness feeds the disorientation, making it impossible to anchor myself in the present when my senses are still trapped in the past.
I roll.
Onto my hands and knees, gripping the sheets with fists that tremble hard enough to make the fabric shake. The position is grounding by necessity—four points of contact with a surface that is cotton and mattress andnow, not rain-slicked concrete and brick wall andthen. My forehead drops to the sheets. My breath fogs the fabric with each failed inhale.
But I can’t see.
Tears—actual tears, the kind I don’t allow, the kind that no one in any department or jurisdiction or life has ever been permitted to witness—are flooding my vision, pouring down my face with the same relentless insistence as the rain in the dream, hot and humiliating and completely beyond my control.
I fall off the bed.
Not gracefully. Not with the controlled descent of someone who intends to use the floor. I simply…go over the edge. Kneesconnecting with hardwood, palms catching the impact a half-second too late, the jolt traveling through my wrists and up my forearms. The pain barely registers. Pain requires processing capacity that my brain has entirely allocated to surviving the next thirty seconds.
The bathroom.
The thought surfaces with the clarity of a survival directive—singular, bright, cutting through the storm of panic with the precision of something my body has learned through repetition. Not the first time. Not the tenth. A ritual worn smooth by use, the same way a river wears stone: slowly, relentlessly, until the path is too deep to deviate from.
I scramble.
Hands and knees across hardwood that is cold enough to feel through the haze, then upright against the bathroom doorframe, my shoulder slamming into the wood as I overcompensate for legs that have forgotten how to balance. The shower handle turns beneath my palm—all the way to the left, maximum cold, a setting that exists for exactly this purpose.
Water hits my body like a punishment.
Ice cold. Immediate. So shocking that my lungs seize on impact, the hyperventilation interrupted by the biological override of water that the body interprets as life-threatening. The gasp that follows is involuntary, enormous, the first real breath I’ve taken since waking—dragged into my lungs by the primal urgency of a system that has been jolted from one emergency into another.
I’m still in my clothes. Black V-neck shirt, cotton shorts—whatever I’d been sleeping in before the nightmare detonated through my rest and launched me into this particular circle of hell. The fabric plasters to my skin like a second layer, heavy with water, the cold seeping through the cotton and into thetissue beneath until my teeth start chattering with a violence that makes my jaw ache.
But the panic hasn’t left.
It’s still there—crouching behind the shock of the cold water, waiting for the body to acclimate so it can resurface and continue its systematic destruction of everything I’ve built to contain it. The fear. The agony. The fuckingpainthat has nothing to do with the water’s temperature and everything to do with the memory of a man’s voice whisperingI wasn’t giving you an optionwhile rain blurred the line between his face and the darkness.
My hand shoots out of the shower.
Fingers closing around the towel hanging on the rack outside the glass door, yanking it from the bar with enough force that the rod clangs against the wall. I press the fabric to my mouth—both hands, shoving the towel against my lips with the desperate pressure of someone trying to contain an explosion.
And I scream.
Into the towel. Into the fabric that tastes like detergent and cotton and the mundane reality of a life that operates normally when its occupant isn’t disintegrating in a shower at whatever ungodly hour the clock has decided to assign to this particular breakdown.
I scream again.
And again.
Each one ripping from somewhere deeper than my throat—from my chest, my stomach, the locked vault behind my ribs where I keep every moment of violation and betrayal and the particular, corrosive rage of a woman who has been told by the system, by her pack, by the world that her body is not entirely her own.
The towel absorbs the sound the way it’s supposed to. Muffles the screams into something that doesn’t carry throughthe thin walls of this apartment, doesn’t alert the neighbors, doesn’t generate a noise complaint that would require explanation.Professional considerations, even now. Even on the shower floor at three a.m. with my body in revolt and my mind in pieces, the officer in me is managing the optics of her own collapse.
The world spins.
