My head is a very dark place.

<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/IMG_7659.jpeg"/>I found myself there again. I promised I wouldn’t return. But somehow, without footsteps, without memory, I was already before him. I tell myself not to look. I know what stood above me. Still, my eyes betray me. There’s something about helplessness that teaches the neck to bend. He stood where every escape became another path back to him. Every direction curved into his shadow. <img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/IMG_7658.jpeg"/>He says nothing. He never calls my name. He only extends a hand. Silence has always been his favorite language. Perhaps that is why I trusted him, because I love silence too. Pathetic! <img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/IMG_7661.jpeg"/>Pathetic. That is the word I give myself. Because I watched the walls close in and convinced myself they were becoming smaller rooms. I could have spoken. I could have reached for another hand. Instead, I learned to survive inside my own collapse. By the time he offered help, it no longer felt like a choice. It felt inevitable. So, I took his hand. Never because I trusted him. Because drowning eventually mistakes the anchor for salvation. <img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/IMG_7689.jpeg"/>Only later did I realize his hand was never reaching into the darkness. It was reaching from it. The warnings had always been there. The sleepless nights, the conversations that never left my mouth. The smiles rehearsed so often they became another kind of lie. Every sign was written on the walls. I simply convinced myself the walls were talking to someone else. <img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/IMG_7662.jpeg"/> Now the darkness has a government. It passes law inside my mind. Hope is taxed. Joy is questioned at the border. Every attempt to escape requires papers I no longer possess. Even when I scream, the echoes return wearing my own voice. They tell me everyone is watching. Everyone is judging. Everyone already knows. So, I become quieter. Silence, after all, is the national anthem of this place. <img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/IMG_7667.jpeg"/> Sometimes I run. I convince myself I’ve finally escaped. And then I notice the sky is still black. The air still belongs to him. And every road somehow remembers where my head lives. The cruelest part is not that the darkness exists. It is that, after enough time, it begins introducing itself as me. It rearranges my memories. Borrows my face. Speaks with my voice. Until I no longer know whether I’m surviving the darkness. or simply giving it another name. My head is a very dark place. Not because there is no light. But because the darkness has become so familiar that when light finally knocks, I mistake it for another shadow.

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