It’s late. Exhaustion tugs at her eyelids, but sleep cannot find her. Her body begs for rest while her mind whirs on, heavy with grief, heavy with pain.
It ping-pongs from thought to thought, never landing anywhere solid. To land would mean staying. To stay would mean feeling.
Instead, it flits from room to room, throwing open drawers and cupboard doors, peering inside before slamming them shut again. Quick. Before the thought can fully form. Before the memory can fully surface. Before the feeling can crest.
A flash of shame. A glimpse of fear. A fragment of memory.
Death by a thousand paper cuts.
Soon her mind is spinning through every painful thing it can find. Pain mutates into shame, weaponized and turned inward. The thoughts grow louder, faster, until she’s pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes, as if enough pressure might stop the tears from falling.
From the outside, you would see a woman lying naked on her bed. Face buried in her hands. Otherwise still.
Outwardly calm, inwardly collapsing.
The thoughts scream and swear and claw at the walls. Her eyes leak despite her best efforts. She lets the spiral take her. Lets her mind beat against her skull with fists made of cruel words.
She knows what is happening.
She can name every symptom. Every cognitive distortion.
She is, after all, a doctor of the mind.
And yet knowledge offers no immunity.
None of the tricks work tonight.
This is what it does. It burrows. It roots itself beneath the skin. It waits.
She has fought it. She has. She has gotten stronger. Softer. Braver. She has survived.
And still, sometimes—often—it catches her.
A prisoner in her own mind. Stuck in the aftermath.
The kind that leaves fragments everywhere.
Pieces of her life scattered farther than she may ever be able to gather back together.
Time has passed, and yet pieces of glass still litter the floor. Others remain embedded where she cannot see them.
A sharp edge beneath the skin.
A shard catching the light.
But glass has a way of never fully leaving. Even after the larger pieces are gone, glittering fragments remain. They lie dormant for months until the wrong shift sends a sharp reminder through the body.
That is what scares her most.
Not whether she will survive—she already has.
But whether it will ever truly be gone.
Whether it will ever stop living just beneath the surface. Whether life will ever stop feeling like a wound barely scabbed over, vulnerable to being reopened by the smallest, most innocent things.
A passing comment no one else would think twice about.
And suddenly the consequences are enormous again: the terror, the disgust, the shame, the grief. All that has been lost. All that was taken.
But what happened afterward.
How one moment can eclipse so many others. How it can stretch itself thin across months and years, darkening places it was never invited to touch.
The way it can keep echoing through a life.
The way it settles over moments that should have belonged only to themselves.
A body that once felt ordinary.
The shadow arrives anyway, inserting itself into places where it does not belong.
She is stronger than she was.
Awake in the dark. Holding her own face together. Mourning not only what happened, but the shadow it left behind.
But because shadows linger long after the thing that made them.
