Books, and my body.
Krystyna's library card became mine without her ever formally giving it to me. She liked the idea of me reading. It made her feel like she was forming something. Cultivating something. She never understood what she was actually feeding.
I chose things thatansweredsomething.
Philosophy.
Psychology.
Stories where people were broken and didn’t stay that way. Stories where something inside a person turned and never turned back. And when I wasn’t reading, I was working out.
At first, it had been instinctive.
Push-ups on the floor of my room, pulling against the doorframe, small and quiet repetitions that no one paid attention to. Over time, it became a system. Pain measured, progress tracked, muscles responding the way the rest of my life never had.
Your body doesn’t lie to you, little Ghost. It doesn’t pretend. It gives you exactly what you earn from it, nothing more, nothing less. And when everything else in your life is unpredictable, that kind of honesty becomes addictive.
I needed that. Because everything else remained exactly the same.
Or, well, almost everything.
One night, I had nearly managed to forget about the locked door. Buried the memory of it beneath grief, exhaustion, and every pathetic attempt I could make to escape the reality I was trapped in. Until…
THUD.
The sound tore through the house hard enough to jolt me upright. Like a massive cabinet had tipped over and crashed against the wooden floor. Or Bartosz had gotten too drunk again and fallen out of bed.
Honestly, with him, it could’ve been either one.
I stayed sitting upright in my bed, my ears straining as I tried to catch something that could explain the loud crash. Footsteps against the floor, followed by heavy breathing from someone trying to lift whatever had fallen back into place. The sound of Bartosz grunting and complaining in some pathetic attempt to drag his drunken body back into bed. Just something, anything that could explain the sudden disturbance and make it feel normal again. But nothing came.
The only thing filling the room was my own pulse ringing violently in my ears while I sat frozen in the dark, waiting for another sound that never came.
I tried to remember where the sound had come from, trying to place it somewhere specific, tie it to something real, but the house had already fallen back into stillness, and after that, there was nothing.
It should’ve ended there, but something about it stayed stuck in my head.
Night after night, I lay awake, turning endlessly in bed while my mind kept circling back to that sound, no matter how hard I tried to let it go.
I could’ve sworn I’d started hearing someone moving around the house at night. Footsteps somewhere beyond my room.
Furniture dragging slowly across the floorboards.
Just this constant feeling that the house didn’t feel the same anymore, like there was another presence moving through it now besides the two I’d gotten used to living with. Some nights, my curiosity came close to taking over completely, but I also knew how little it took to push Bartosz over the edge.
One wrong sound from my room.
One floorboard creaking at the wrong time.
If he caught me wandering around the house at night, he’d probably convince himself I was sneaking around with Krystynabehind his back, and then he’d beat the shit out of me again. Or maybe he wouldn’t even need to believe it. Maybe he’d just use it as an excuse to put his hands on me one more time. Krystyna didn’t stop.
She adapted; so did Bartosz.
And I learned to exist inside both of them without breaking in ways that were visible. Breaking is inevitable; the only real question is whether anyone sees it happening. At sixteen, no one did.
Ever since the first night Krystyna visited me, on my twelfth birthday, my inner world had disappeared. I tried reaching for it again a couple of times after that, desperate to fall back into it the way I used to, but it never worked.
I could still lie in bed and build the images in my head like before.
