The way my hands felt, the way my body moved without hesitation, without doubt, like it had already done it a hundred times before. And he was there. Hewasthere. I remember it. Standing close, watching, encouraging. Except… no. My breath hitched, chest tightening like something inside me was trying to tear its way out.
Krystyna. The sound she made, the blood when we took care of her body in the cabin, and him,him,right there again. But the memory shifted, like something underneath it was starting to push through. There was no second set of footsteps, no second shadow, no one standing behind me. Just… me.
“Fuck…”
My head dropped forward for a second, breath coming faster now, uneven, my temples starting to pulse, building, like something was trying to split my skull open from the inside. The psychiatrist, the house, Anna, the basement. He had been there, every time, always fucking there. Always watching, always guiding. The thought hit too hard, too fast.
Always me.
My head snapped up and I stared at my reflection again. Really stared this time. Like I could force something else to appear if I just looked hard enough. If I just… nothing. My chest tightenedso hard it almost knocked the air out of me. My thoughts started running too fast to hold onto, slipping over each other, overlapping, colliding, every memory dragging another with it until it was just noise. Faces, voices, rooms, blood, hands, his voice, my voice, I couldn’t separate them anymore, couldn’t tell where one ended and the other started.
Pain shot through my temples, violently.
I sucked in a breath, one hand coming up to press hard against the side of my head like I could hold it together, like I could stop it from cracking open. Fuck. Everything kept coming, and the worst part, the part that sat underneath all of it, quiet and certain and impossible to ignore, I had never been alone.
Not once.
And I had never not been alone either.
The mirror didn’t change, didn’t break, just me, standing there, breathing like something was dying inside my chest. Trying and failing, to understand where the fuck he ended and I began. Nothing came back clean, it tore its way in. No warning, just everything at once, but this time, wrong in a way that made my stomach drop before my head even caught up, because I wasn’tinit anymore, I was watching it.
The door, that fucking door.
I saw it from the outside now, not from where I used to stand with my hand hovering, waiting, always waiting for it to open like it ever would, but from a distance, like I’d stepped out of my own body and left something behind.
There was no one else in the hallway, no presence leaning against the wall, just me, a kid, staring at wood like it meant something.
My spine tightened, like something inside me had just been grabbed and squeezed hard enough to crack. The forest, I saw it again. Cold air, dirt under my nails, hours bleeding into each other, sitting there, only this time there was no one across fromme. No one talking, just me, sitting there alone, head tilted like I was hearing something that wasn’t there, shaping myself around a voice that had never left my throat.
Bartosz, that night, I saw it from outside this time. Saw my own body move, saw the way my shoulders set, the way my hands came down on his face, and there was no one standing in the doorway.
Krystyna, the same, the same fucking thing.
My breathing started to break, coming in wrong, too fast, not deep enough, like my lungs had forgotten how to work properly, like something heavy had been dropped straight onto my chest and just stayed there.
The house, the basement, Anna, the psychiatrist, every single time, every single fucking time, it had just been me. The realization didn’t come as a thought, it came as a collapse. Something inside me just gave way, like a support beam snapping and everything that had been built on top of it came crashing down with it, loud and violent and impossible to ignore.
I had spent my whole life trying to outrun something, blaming something, fighting something and it had been breathing with my lungs the whole time, beating inside my chest, carrying my name.
My hand slammed against the sink, hard enough to rattle the metal, but it didn’t pull me back, nothing did, because there was nowhere to go. No distance to put between me and it.
Between me and… me.
My chest tightened harder, like it was being crushed from the inside, each breath getting shorter, useless. I couldn’t pull air in right, couldn't fill my lungs. It just caught halfway, like something was blocking it, like my body was rejecting it. My vision started to blur at the edges enough to make everything feel unstable.
I dragged a hand up to my chest, fingers digging in like I could pry it open, like I could rip whatever the fuck this was out of me and throw it somewhere far enough away that I didn’t have to feel it anymore. But there was nowhere far enough, because it wasn’t something inside me, it was me and there was no getting away from that.
I bent forward, breath hitching again, failing again, my heart hitting too fast, too hard, like it was trying to break out of my ribs just to escape me. Something hollow and violent and collapsing in on itself at the same time.
I had never been guided, never been protected. I had just been split and now there was nothing left to hide behind, nothing left to blame, just me.
Everything got too tight inside my chest, inside my head, inside everything. There was no space left to stand in, no distance, no gap I could step into and breathe for just one second without it being there,all of it,every memory folding in on itself, every version of me collapsing into one until there was nowhere left to hide, nowhere left to separate anything from anything else.
I couldn’t stay in it.
My body moved before I thought about it, before I could stop it.
I lunged forward and drove my face straight into the mirror. The sound, fuck, it cracked through the cell like a gunshot. Metal bending, glass giving away in a split second that felt too long, longer than anything should be allowed to last, pain exploded through my skull, white and blinding, my vision flared and dropped at the same time, pain ripping through my head so fast it didn’t even feel real at first, just a shockwave that knocked everything sideways.
