W Where No Starlight Reaches

The night terrors have returned.

I had not contended with them for so long that I had almost forgotten their particular cruelty, the way they do not merely frighten but dismantle. I grew up surrounded by abusive thoughts, words, and emotions, and while my waking hours were spent enduring those, the nights belonged to something worse. Nightmares and sleep paralysis poisoned every hour of darkness, so that there was no reprieve, no safe quarter of the clock.

I would go days without sleeping. I was a shell of a child, and later, a shell of an adult. Sometimes they came several times in a single night, leaving me exhausted and half-dead for days afterwards, not living, merely persisting.

This past year had been gentler. They visited perhaps once every few months, distant, almost polite, like an old enemy who has lost interest.

But since my grandmother’s decline, since the ground beneath me split open again, every buried emotion has clawed its way back to the surface. My balance was torn from me, and now the old darkness pools where it always pooled: in the hours between midnight and dawn.

I thought it might help to speak of these things. But how does one speak of them? Some experiences refuse language. Some things are so black and suffocating that no arrangement of words can hold their shape.

They are not thoughts. They are not even images. They are feelings, vast, formless presences that loom over everything and rob you of the ability to inhabit the present moment. You are there, but you are not there. You are alive, but something essential has been confiscated.

There are many causes, many roots to how these terrors first took hold, how they gained dominion over me.

First of all these reasons, I am a child of the darkness. A child of death. This is what was forced down my throat for as long as I can remember, but most viciously during childhood, when I was defenceless against the weight of adult conviction and had no choice but to believe what I was told.

When I came into this world, I nearly killed my mother. I sent her hovering between life and death. Life won, eventually, but the resentment that followed was palpable. I could almost touch it. It hung in rooms. It flavoured every silence. It was the sour, persistent undertone of my earliest years.

The fact that I, too, had arrived dead , that I had to be forced into breathing, pressed upon me a stamp I could not wash off. Invalid. Not worthy to breathe. And that was that. But the worst of it was not the label itself. The worst was the ritual.

Every time my birth was mentioned, every time my birthday came around, I was reminded of what I was: an utter void. A black hole. A thing that should not have survived and perhaps should not have arrived at all.

And so, when I came to my senses , when consciousness sharpened enough to know fear, and remember it, the demons appeared.

Ghouls. Wraiths. Shadows with intent. They pressed down on my chest as I drift between waking and sleep. They sat on me. They pinched. They bit. Or worse, they simply watched from the corners of the room, staring, making me feel seen and utterly exposed. And I could not move. I could not scream. I was paralysed. I was helpless. I was five years old and all the years old and every age in between, all at once, all trapped in the same body that will not obey me.

For years, I prayed they would not come. Or that I might at least be given some weapon, some device to fight them with. I learned technique after technique, every strategy the books and the therapists prescribed, and each one proved, in the end, only how completely alone I was with them.

The worst thing is that I do not see them. They have no faces. No forms I can describe. They are only a presence. They are only a knowing, a dread so total it has no edges, no outline, nothing to push against. The worst kind of enemy: no body to strike, no eyes to lock with. Just shadows.

Where I am from. What I am.

But again, the last year was particularly kind to me. However, the few weeks that passed recently, I am again drenched in sweat every night, I wake up breathing so hard I wake up the whole house, I am screaming, crying, shivering and my heart beats so fast, I wonder when will it run away, out of my body. I am toyed with again, several times during the night, leaving me useless and moody for the following days to come.

My feelings are so dark, like the furthest part of the Universe, where no star light reaches. I am working extremely hard on myself, to make my life so much better and deal with the things that I did to myself, mostly bad choices and bad relationship decisions. They always press on me very hard during the day, but there is hope, like a little shining light, piercing through this vast emptiness of my soul and that gives me a reason to go forward. However, when my night terrors are this active, I have nowhere to regenerate and find solace, and this little hope, this little energy bundle is suffocated by the endless void what is inside me.

But again, the last year had been particularly kind to me. A reprieve. A mercy. Nice and supportive relationship and home life.

Then the past few weeks arrived, and this peace was revoked. I am again drenched in sweat every night, waking with breath so violent it rouses the whole house. I scream. I cry. I shiver as though something has crawled inside my bones.

My heart beats so fast I wonder when it will simply abandon me, just tearing itself free and flee my body altogether. I am toyed with, again and again, several times across the same stretch of darkness, and by morning I am useless: hollow, brittle, foul-tempered for days afterwards. A person scraped clean of patience and presence.

My feelings are so dark they belong to the furthest reaches of the universe, where no starlight has ever arrived and none ever shall. I am working extraordinarily hard on myself, harder than most people will ever know, to build a better life, to reckon with the damage I have done to myself through poor choices and worse relationships. These things press down on me during the daylight hours, always, with a weight that never fully lifts.

But there is hope. There has been always hope. A small, stubborn light, thin as a needle, piercing through the vast emptiness of my soul, and it is enough. It is enough to give me a reason to go forward, to believe that forward exists at all.

But when the night terrors are this active, that light has nowhere safe to burn. There is no quiet hour in which to regenerate, no shelter in which to find solace. And the little hope, that fragile, precious bundle of energy I have fought so hard to keep alive, is suffocated by the endless void that lives inside me. Smothered. Not extinguished, perhaps. But starved of air.

My head is so sore it causes me an almost ethereal pain, not quite of the body, not quite of the mind, but somewhere in the space between where neither medicine nor reason can reach. Sleep deprivation is settling in, slow and deliberate. And even though I am dying to sleep, I force myself to stay awake as I cannot endure the same dread and fear all over again. I would rather ache with exhaustion than surrender to what waits for me behind my eyelids. How I am wishing for peaceful sleeping again.

And, my heart is sour. I am experiencing and anticipating one of the greatest losses of my life, and I say this as someone who is no stranger to loss. I have known abandonment. Grief. Betrayal. Loneliness. Abuse. I have been well-acquainted with each of them, sometimes all at once. But this is something I have never encountered. This is about a person who is my friend, my ally, the woman who held my world together , and she is withering away. Slowly. Irreversibly. And I have no power to stop it. I could give all the riches on Earth, all my possessions so I could see her just pass gently and not patched up with threads and needles, attached to a hospital bed.

Of course it throws me off balance. Of course it tears a hole in whatever peace I had built around myself. And of course my demons noticed. They have been waiting, patient, opportunistic, for exactly this kind of rupture, this gap in my armour, this fracture in the bubble of calm I had so carefully tended. They could not wait to flood back in and make me suffer once again.

Will I let them win?

Possibly not. But it will be a fierce fight. Because the peace I tasted this past year is something I am not willing to trade for anything. I have held it. I have known what it feels like to sleep without dread, to wake without wreckage. To be awake and be happy and at ease at home and at work. And I will not surrender that quietly. Not to the shadows. Not to the void. Not even to grief.