the night time stood still.
Time didn’t stop all at once.
It slipped.
Soft at first, like it was stretching its arms, waking up slow, warning me.
The air felt so heavy in the way only certain nights do.
The kind of heavy that lives under the skin, crawls through your veins.
The kind that says something is coming.
I remember smoke.
Warm. Familiar.
Breathing in, breathing out.
Trying to calm the tremor in my chest.
There were sirens blaring
Sirens blaring, not from the street.
From the sky.
As if the universe itself was screaming.
So loud it felt silent.
So violent the world went still.
And in that silence, everything inside me snapped into slow motion.
Seven seconds.
That’s how long it lasted.
Or maybe it was forever.
It’s hard to tell the difference when your body forgets how to count.
I felt my heartbeat slam against my ribs.
I felt the air go thin.
I felt the ground fall away.
And then
I wasn’t inside myself anymore.
I was above, watching.
Some version of me stood there, breathing.
Another version floated, waiting.
Something ended in those seven seconds.
Something I never got back.
People think trauma is the moment itself.
It’s not.
It’s the echo.
The way time keeps folding you back into it.
Because the truth is
this wasn’t the first night like this.
And it wouldn’t be the last.
There have been other sirens.
Other silences.
Other versions of me left behind in the dark.
I survived, call it strength.
But you don’t see what I buried to keep going.
You didn’t see what never woke up again.
The world started moving.
Everyone kept talking.
Everything went back to normal.
Except me.
I stayed in that night.
Still listening.
Still waiting
for the sky to stop screaming.
