I refuse to sleep. My body aches for rest, my eyes burn, and my thoughts blur at the edges. But sleep is not rest for me. Sleep is where it finds me. Because I am having nightmares of what happened. The moment I close my eyes, the past opens its door. And I am no longer who I am now. I am her again. A little girl who didn’t understand what was happening, only that something felt wrong. A little girl who froze, who stayed quiet, who carried something she never should have had to carry. A little girl who learned too early what fear feels like in the dark. At night, she comes back to life in me. The room disappears. Time folds in on itself. And I am pulled into memories that don’t always come as clear images, but as feelings, heavy, suffocating, inescapable. My chest tightens. My body goes still. My mind whispers the same old fear 'it’s happening again'. Because I remember the blanket. I remember how something that was supposed to mean comfort became something else. How safety was taken and twisted into silence. How I lay there, small and still, while someone crossed a line that should never have been crossed. Under the blanket, where no one could see. Under the blanket, where I thought I had to disappear just to survive it. He used to bring his own blanket. I didn’t understand it then. I didn’t question it. I only knew that when that blanket came, something in me would go quiet. Still. Afraid. Now I understand. And now, I have my own. My own blanket. My own space. My own boundary. It might seem like a small thing to others, something ordinary, something insignificant. But to me, it is control. It is safety. It is a quiet promise that no one gets to cross that line again. I don’t let anyone touch it. Not because I’m difficult. Not because I don’t trust people. But because I am finally learning what it means to protect myself. Even now, I can’t stay under it for too long. It doesn’t feel like warmth. It feels like being trapped. Like the air is being taken from me. Like something is about to happen again. My body reacts before my mind can explain, my chest tightens, my breathing turns shallow, and I need to get out, to push it away, to remind myself that I’m not there anymore. But fear doesn’t care about time. So I stay awake. Because staying awake feels like control. It feels like the only way to keep the door closed. If I don’t sleep, I don’t dream. If I don’t dream, I don’t go back there. But the truth is, even when I try to escape it, it finds me. In flashes. In feelings. In nightmares that pull me back into a place I never chose to return to. I wake up in pieces, heart racing, breath uneven, my body reacting to something that isn’t here anymore. It takes time to remember where I am. To remind myself that I am older now. That I am not in that place. That no one is here. But the feeling lingers. Because it doesn’t live in the past. It lives in the body. In the silence. In the spaces where no one ever said, 'that wasn’t your fault.” In the nights where a child had to carry fear alone. I know now what I didn’t know then. What happened to me was real. What happened to me mattered. And what happened to me was not my fault. But knowing that doesn’t always quiet the nightmares. So here I am, caught between a body that needs rest and a mind that is afraid of what rest brings. Caught between safety and memory. Refusing to sleep feels like protection. But maybe it’s also a kind of grief. Grief for the nights that were taken. For the safety that was broken. For the little girl who had to grow up with fear instead of comfort. She’s still here, I think. Not as a weakness, but as someone I am finally learning to protect. And maybe one day, I won’t have to stay awake to protect her. Maybe one day, sleep won’t feel like surrender. Maybe one day, the night will be just the night. But for now, I refuse to sleep.
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