The Night I Relived My Worst Day

Some nights are heavier than others.
Some nights carry a silence so thick it presses against your chest until even breathing feels like a battle. That night was one of them.

I had gone to bed late, expecting nothing more than the usual restless tossing and turning. Sleep never came easily anymore. But when I finally closed my eyes, I didn’t find the familiar darkness of dreams. Instead, I opened them to find myself standing on a road I knew too well.

The streetlights glowed dim and yellow, stretching long shadows across the pavement. The air was heavy with summer heat, carrying the faint smell of asphalt and gasoline. My stomach twisted because I recognized this place.

I had sworn never to walk here again.

And then I heard it. The low growl of an engine. The screech of tires far too close.

I knew what was coming.

I was back in the worst day of my life.

It had been three years since the accident. Three years since Daniel—my best friend, my brother in everything but blood—was taken from me. We had been walking home from the late-night diner, full of fries and bad jokes, laughing so hard we could barely breathe. And then, in an instant, headlights swallowed us.

I survived. He didn’t.

For three years, I carried that night like an anchor tied to my chest. The guilt, the grief, the endless what-ifs. What if I had noticed the car sooner? What if I had grabbed his arm? What if I had been the one hit instead? No amount of therapy, no comforting words, no time passing had ever loosened its grip.

And now, my mind—or maybe something greater—had dragged me back to it.

I wanted to scream, to run, to wake up. But I couldn’t. My body refused to move. My feet were cemented to the asphalt, my mouth locked shut. All I could do was watch.

Daniel appeared beside me, alive again, his hair messy from the summer air, his grin wide and easy. He kicked a rock down the road just like he had that night. My throat closed at the sight of him.

I wanted to grab him, to hold him, to beg him not to take another step. I wanted to change everything.

But time moved forward, merciless.

The headlights flared. The screech ripped the silence apart. The crash echoed like a thunderclap inside my chest.

I fell to my knees in the dream, just like I had in reality, reliving the horror in every detail. My palms burned as they hit the asphalt. My heart shattered again, a wound torn open where it had never truly healed.

But then—something different happened.

Daniel turned.

Not the broken, still image burned into my memory. Not the lifeless silence that had haunted me since that night. No—he turned toward me, alive, whole, his eyes steady on mine.

And he spoke.

“You have to let me go.”

The words didn’t match the scene. They cut through it, raw and sharp, as if they weren’t part of the dream at all but something more.

Tears blurred my vision. My voice came out as a whisper, broken and small. “I can’t.”

Daniel smiled the way he used to when he caught me stressing about little things. Soft, patient, almost teasing.

“You’re still living on this road,” he said. “Every night, every day, you’re waiting for it to happen again. But it already happened. You can’t stop it. You can only move on.”

My chest burned. My body shook. I wanted to argue, to insist that holding on to him was all I had left. But the look in his eyes told me everything. He wasn’t asking me to forget. He was asking me to live.

And then—he was gone.

The road melted into darkness. The headlights disappeared. The sound of tires faded until there was nothing but silence.

I opened my eyes to my bedroom ceiling. My heart pounded. Sweat soaked through my shirt. My pillow was damp with tears. For a long time, I just lay there, gasping for air, unsure if I had truly woken or if the dream still held me in its grip.

But something was different.

For the first time in three years, the weight on my chest felt lighter. The guilt, while not gone, had loosened its claws. The pain was still there, but beneath it, I felt something I hadn’t allowed myself in so long—relief.

The dream hadn’t erased the past. It hadn’t brought Daniel back. But it gave me something I didn’t know I needed: permission.

Permission to stop punishing myself. Permission to keep living without betraying his memory. Permission to carry him forward in love, not in guilt.

That night, I relived my worst day. But I also let it go.

And maybe—just maybe—that was Daniel’s way of setting me free.