“I Buried My Fear — But It Came Back Hungry”

I Buried My Fear — But It Came Back Hungry

By [Ali Rehman]

I thought I had buried it.

Deep beneath layers of denial and silence, under years of smiles and careful avoidance, I believed the fear was gone — locked away in some dark corner of my mind where it could do no harm.

But fear is not something you bury and forget. Fear is a parasite. It waits. It grows. And it always comes back hungry.

It started subtly, like a whisper in the dark. At first, I barely noticed. The cold chill that ran down my spine when I was alone in my apartment. The shadows that seemed to linger a second too long in the corner of my eye.

I told myself it was nothing. Just nerves. Stress.

But then the dreams began.

Night after night, I found myself trapped in a dark forest, the trees twisted and unnatural. The ground beneath my feet was soft and cold, as if made of rotting flesh. I heard breathing behind me, ragged and uneven, but whenever I turned, there was nothing but silence and shifting shadows.

In the dream, I ran — but the forest never ended. It closed in tighter, squeezing me with branches like claws.

I woke up gasping, heart pounding, sweat soaking my sheets.

I tried to shake it off, but the dreams grew worse. Faces appeared in the darkness — grotesque, distorted versions of people I knew. Their eyes hollow, their mouths stretched in silent screams.

During the day, I started to see things. Flickers at the edge of my vision, figures lurking in mirrors that vanished when I looked directly. The fear I thought I had buried was clawing its way back to the surface.

I avoided my friends. I stopped answering calls. I couldn’t explain what was happening without sounding crazy.

One night, I found a note slipped under my door. No handwriting, no signature — just three words scrawled in jagged letters:

“You can’t hide.”

I wanted to tear it up, to throw it away like trash. But the words burned in my mind, like a curse.

The fear was no longer content to haunt my dreams or play tricks in my mind. It was real. It was alive.

I remembered then — the trauma I had spent years running from. The night I swore never to speak of, the memories I buried beneath layers of distraction and forced smiles.

It was all coming back.

I was losing control.

One evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon and shadows filled my apartment, I sat in the dark, trembling. The silence was thick, oppressive.

Suddenly, a whisper broke through — soft, mocking, cruel.

“Run.”

I covered my ears, but the voice seeped through the walls, the floor, the very air.

“You can’t run.”

The room twisted around me. Walls stretched and bent, breathing like a living thing. The floor cracked beneath my feet, revealing a pit filled with writhing hands reaching for me.

I fell.

I fell into the abyss of my own mind — a place I had locked and chained, hoping never to return.

And there it was.

The monster I had buried.

It was not a creature of claws or teeth, but a shadow — darker than night, heavier than grief. It whispered all the things I had tried to forget: the shame, the pain, the helplessness. It wrapped itself around me like a suffocating fog.

But this time, I didn’t run.

I faced it.

I screamed into the darkness, told it it didn’t own me anymore. I tore through the lies I had built, the walls of silence and fear.

And slowly, the shadow shrank.

The hands released me. The walls stopped breathing. The abyss grew quiet.

When I opened my eyes, I was back in my apartment, the first light of dawn filtering through the curtains.

I was broken. But I was alive.

I knew now — fear was not my enemy. It was a part of me. A warning. A scar.

I could not bury it anymore.

I had to carry it, face it, and feed it with truth instead of silence.

Because if I didn’t, it would come back — hungry, louder, and ready to consume me whole.