And again.
Not every day, but often enough that my body began to pick up on the signs before it happened. The way the house sounded when he had been drinking more than usual. Violence becamepart of the structure, just like everything else. For a while, the nights with Krystyna changed.
She didn’t come in like she used to. The space she used to occupy remained empty, and in that absence, something almost felt like… a pause. Like the house was holding itself in a different kind of tension. But nothing really disappears; it just becomes something else.
It started slowly again after a few months.
Krystyna visited me in my room at night like she used to. Late, when the house was certain Bartosz wouldn’t wake. When his breathing had settled into that heavy, unreachable depth. And just like that, everything returned. Not as it had been, but alongside something new.
That’s the thing about deterioration.
It doesn’t replace what was there; it adds to it. Layer by layer, until one day you realize, there is no part of your life that isn’t shaped by it. That was the version of life I learned to exist inside.
I never really questioned it or fought it; It was just something I adjusted to the way the body adjusts to pain when it realizes it’s not temporary. It’s strange how quickly that happens. How something unbearable, over time, becomes familiar. Not easier, never easier, just known. And there’s a certain kind of comfort in knowing what to expect, even when what you expect is wrong.
I stopped reacting.
From the outside, it might have even looked like peace. Like I had finally settled. But you and I both know that I had just learned where to place everything inside myself so it didn’t show.
I have to say, there’s something about you, little Ghost.
Most people would have stepped back by now. Closed the page. Told themselves this isn’t for them. Because it’s too much, too heavy, maybe even too real. But you didn’t. That kind ofcuriosity… It has consequences. Because the longer you stay here with me, the harder it becomes to separate what’s mine from what starts to feel like yours, and we’re not even close to the end yet.
There are things I haven’t told you.
Things I didn’t understand back then.
Things that didn’t make sense until much later. Like the way the house began to feel… different. A sound somewhere there hadn’t been one before. Footsteps that didn’t match the patterns I knew. A presence that didn’t belong to either Bartosz or Krystyna.
I remember noticing it the way you notice something in the corner of your eye, but don’t turn your head. Not because you’re not curious, no, but because something in you already knows that once you look, you don’t get to pretend it wasn’t there. You’ll see what I mean.Soon. So stay close, little Ghost, you’ve come too far to lose me here.
The Catalyst
Chapter 10
It’s unsettling how much your sense of time can collapse when you’re living in a constant state of hypervigilance.
It replaces small things first.
The way you think, the way you hold your body, and one day… you look up, and the boy you used to be feels like someone you barely remember rather than the shell you grew out of.
But time passed, and suddenly I was sixteen.
Not that the number really mattered; numbers are only useful for other people. They give them something to measure, something to place you within. But internally, I felt like time stood still and that I had stopped aging in ways that made sense long before that.
Still, if you had seen me then, you would have noticed the difference.
Puberty had not been subtle with me. It rarely is with boys who have something to prove, even if they don’t know who they’re proving it to.
My body had caught up in ways my mind had already surpassed years ago.
Taller and harder in places that used to be soft, and suddenly, I stood level with Bartosz. That mattered more than you might think. Because power doesn’t begin when you surpass someone, it begins the moment you realize youalmostcan. That realization changes the way you breathe in a room with them.
It changes the way you look back when they look at you. It changes everything.
I had built something in those years. Not in a way that anyone would have praised, but internally there was structure now.
Two things kept me stable.
