Night Terrors Torment Me

The nightmares are getting worse, falling asleep feels like diving into an ocean covered in blood and then waiting for when the sharks finally come. It’s terrifying and it’s even worse when I’m sleeping alone. He’s dead and yet I still see his face in every crowd and his cologne lingers around every familiar smell. He haunt me, even from the dead.

I’m tired of spending every day obsessing about death and the chill of cold garage cement. Tonight is no different, I’m spending it trapped inside my own head, drinking vodka until I pass out drunk because I’m too scared to fall asleep on my own. The anxiety eats me alive, anticipating the fucked up dreams I’ve been having. Every night I dream I’m Eric and I’m the one who’s committing his crimes. In his body, I hold down that four year old girl and do to her exactly what he did to me. It’s disgusting. Why is my mind capable of creating such an awful scene and why does it insist on playing on repeat? Is it some kind of weird guilt for not telling? .. I’m sorry.

It makes me feel like maybe one day I’ll end up just like him and that scares me more than anything else.. becoming the monster who ruined my life, he’s the one person I’d never want to mirror the dirty image of. But sometimes I worry that because I was so young the first time I stepped foot into that garage, somehow my development got fucked up and just like a cold you can catch.. one day I’ll wake up and be just like Eric.

She’s mad at me for confessing how often I daydream of death but she doesn’t understand. If every night you had nightmares—not dreams about destroying a little blonde haired girl while she fucking screams.. you’d want to jump off a tall building with me.

She screams, every night she screams and I didn’t make a sound. Sometimes I cried but if my sobbing ever got too loud he’d “Shhhh” me and put his greasy hand over my tiny mouth. I never screamed, I never told a soul what he did and maybe if I had.. four years later he wouldn’t have been able to ruin her the way he did, creating another angry monster with broken knuckles and a fear of men. Maybe if I had spoken up, maybe I could have saved the both of us. I don’t think I could ever express to her how fucking sorry I am for not protecting her innocence, for allowing her clean skin to be soiled by his greasy hands. I wish I had spoken up and now my guilt has decided to punish me, with nightmares filled with the sound of her screams.

Please don’t let me fall asleep.