Nightmare Poetry

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know I live with PTSD, and its quieter sibling, night terrors. Most nights, I manage to sleep through the static. But some nights…the static becomes a storm.

When my mind is especially vulnerable, it creates landscapes I never consented to walk through…tidal waves that return again and again, stories that beg to be forgotten but refuse to burn.

Last night, I had one of those dreams.
And when I woke, the feeling didn’t fade.
It stayed.
It always does.

So I wrote. Not to fix it, but to survive it.
This is what survival sounds like when it’s still raw. When the waves haven’t stopped. When the softness feels far away.

The waves wouldn’t stop.
Not with pleading, not with silence.
Not with the hush of morning
or the grip of my own breath.
They came
rolling, roaring,
a memory with salt on its lips.

The books wouldn’t burn.
I tried, in dreamlight and desperation,
to torch the pages that haunted me.
But the flames died quietly,
as if the stories refused to be erased
as if pain itself had waterlogged the match.

And my sister cried,
watching the fire that never was.
Watching me,
become the villain
in a script I never wanted to write.

I lay still.
Breathing like a lighthouse in fog,
stuck in the vortex
where seconds melt into hours,
and the sun rises like a witness
to how little I’ve moved.
The world spins,
but I just rise and fall.
Up and down.
Up and down.

Comfort surrounds me…
soft pillows, a soft dog,
a man who loves me gently.
The only thing hard
is me.

My skin is foreign,
tight as bark around a storm-split tree.
I want to crawl out of it,
want to unzip this discomfort
and step into something gentler,
but my skin is where I belong.
And I’m not sure I ever wanted to.

I didn’t wake the world with my screaming.
I held it in.
Let the swirl eat me
so others could sleep.
Let the waves throw me
so others could drift in peace.
Let my unrest be private.
Polite.
Contained.

But still, it leaks…
in sighs, in stares,
in poems written at 4:51 AM
when the darkness isn’t external anymore.

They say I’m on a good path.
That it’ll get better.
That softness returns if you wait.

But the softness comes from safety.
From a nervous system that still believes
the danger isn’t hiding behind the door.
Mine?
Blown to bits.
Decimated.

Yet I write.
Yet I rise.
Yet I breathe
like a lighthouse in fog.

I lay beside love
and call myself unworthy of rest.
But I rest anyway.
I close my eyes anyway.

Not because I believe in peace.
But because I am exhausted from the war.

And maybe that’s enough for now:
To be held.
To be haunted.
To be honest.

To say:
The books didn’t burn.
The waves kept coming.
And I am still here.
Salt-soaked.
Skin-bound.
Still here.

Related Read: What Fireworks Feel like When You Have PTSD