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This morning is worse.

Because the nightmare comes back in full fucking force.

The same one.

The one where I’m nine years old, and my mother is dying on the frozen ground because I asked for something I never should have asked for. No matter how many years pass, my brain refuses to let that night stay buried. It drags every detail back to the surface.

The smell of blood.

Christmas lights glowing against bloodstained ground.

The cold. The fear. The helplessness.

And the horrible and crushing truth that I didn’t save her.

It always ends the same way.

She lies bleeding, reaching for me with trembling hands, and I stand frozen, watching her slip away.

Every. Fucking. Time.

I wake with my heart hammering against my ribs and sweat cooling on my skin.

Once the nightmare gets its claws into me, sleep is over. There’s no bargaining with it, no closing my eyes and hoping it disappears.

The memory stays.

Hurting me.

So I do what I always do when I can’t sleep.

I get out of bed, pull on black training shorts and a T-shirt, and head downstairs to beat the living shit out of a punching bag.

The gym occupies nearly an entire wing of the estate. Weights, training equipment, a boxing ring, and heavy bags hanging from steel beams.

Everything I need to turn the pressure in my chest into something physical.

Something I can hit.

Something that hits back.

I wrap my hands and start swinging.

The first punch lands hard. The second lands harder.

By the twentieth, sweat dampens my shirt. By the fiftieth, my knuckles ache.

Good.

Pain I understand.

Pain makes sense.

I keep hitting the bag until my shoulders burn, my arms shake, and my breathing turns ragged.

Until the pressure in my chest finally loosens.

Until the ghost retreats.