Or was that just another lie people tell themselves so they can sleep?
My hands twitched in my lap, a small movement, but it was the first thing my body had done in a while that felt like it came from me.
Another thought appeared, more clear than the others.
I was done bleeding for nothing. Done tearing myself open for things that didn’t deserve it. If I was going to break, if I was going to burn through myself like that, it had to be for something that mattered. Something worth the damage, otherwise what the fuck was the point? Because the worst part, that no one ever talks about, is how close it feels. Self-destruction. It’s intimate. It sits right against your skin, moves with you, breathes with you, knows exactly where to press to make it hurt in the right way, that’s what makes it dangerous.
My body has survived things that should have destroyed me. Hands that treated me like something disposable. People who cut into me emotionally, physically, psychologically, until fear stopped feeling temporary and started feeling permanent. There are parts of me that still react like the danger never ended, parts wired so tightly around survival that even tenderness can feel unfamiliar at first. But I am exhausted from carrying fear like it belongs to other people more than it belongs to me. Exhausted from shrinking myself to make others comfortable with what happened to me.
My body has already paid for enough.
It has bled enough.
Endured enough.
And after everything it survived, I think it deserves something gentler now. Something honest. Hands that do not harm. A room where my nervous system is finally allowed to unclench for the first time in years. I do not owe the world my fear anymore just because other people worked so hard to put it there.
The Detainment
Chapter 40
Forty-eight hours.
That was what they told me later.
Two days. It didn’t feel like two days.
It felt like being trapped inside the same moment for so long that my body started reacting to everything before my brain could even process it anymore. Doors opening and closing. Questions repeated over and over until the words stopped sounding real. At some point exhaustion stopped feeling physical and turned into something uglier. My thoughts slowed down, my body kept moving anyway, and the space between those two things started stretching farther and farther apart.
They took me out again. Cuffs on, harder this time, undeniable, the way it forced my shoulder back until something in my spine started to burn, my hands useless behind me, fingers twitching against nothing, against themselves, against the fact that I couldn’t even clench them properly anymore without the chain pulling tight and reminding me exactly where I was. Walk, turn, stop. I didn’t look at anyone, but I could feel them anyway. The way people look at something they’ve already decided what is, something they’re just waiting to have confirmed so they can stop thinking about it and move on.
They sat me down in front of him, the judge.
I knew what he was before I even looked up, the way the room shifted around him, the way people straightened just enough to show who mattered and who didn’t. I didn’t care to give him that, because the second I lifted my eyes, it was already done, I could see it. Not in his face, he was practiced for that, but in the way everything held still a moment too long, like the air itself was waiting for something it already knew was coming.
Three months, remand extended, risk of flight. That word again, flight. It almost made me laugh – something ugly rising up in my throat that I had to swallow down before it turned into sound. Because the idea of it, of me running, trying to get away, was so fucking detached from reality it bordered on insulting.
I hadn’t even tried to run.
I had been standing there, in the open, covered in dirt and blood and everything they were now pretending to be shocked by and I had stayed.
But no, they needed that word. They needed to make me something that might slip through their fingers if they didn’t hold tight enough. So they tightened. Then came the rest, a psychological evaluation. Because the case didn’t make sense. Because I didn’t speak. Because something about me made them uncomfortable in a way they couldn’t explain– not without handing it off to someone else with a degree and a title and a clean way of sayingthis is what he is.
That was the part that actually got under my skin. Not enough to show it, but enough that something in my chest twisted, slow and mean, like it was looking for somewhere to land. They needed someone else to explain me.
After everything. After what they had seen, after what I had done, they still needed it spelled out.
Pathetic.
And the worst part?
They thought it gave them control. That if they could name it, categorize it, put it in the right fucking box, then suddenly it would be manageable, like I would be manageable. I sat there, hands locked behind me, shoulders screaming from the position and let it build. A kind of anger that doesn’t burn out, that doesn’t flare or disappear. It settles, roots. And I knew,I knew,exactly where it was pointing.
Zwierek, of course it was him, it had to be.
He had been there, I saw him. Standing in the trees like he belonged there, like he had always known exactly where I would end up, like he had been waiting for that moment specifically, watching me tear open the ground, watching me lose it, watching me become exactly what he had spent years shaping me into. And then he disappeared, and suddenly the police were there. You don’t need to be smart to connect that, not about things like that. So yeah, it was him, it had to be. And the second that settled, the anger found somewhere to go.
You feel that, don’t you, little Ghost?
