It Worked Its Way Inside

I woke slowly, though I don’t remember falling asleep. My eyes peeled open into a darkness that wasn’t empty but thick, like tar. The air pressed down heavy, humming with something alive. For a moment, I thought it was only my own body — the pulse of blood in my ears, my heart pounding too violently.

Then I heard it.

Breathing.

Not mine. Louder than mine. Deep, guttural, a sound that scraped the walls and filled the corners. I stopped breathing, holding my chest still, but the sound didn’t stop. If anything, it grew louder. Each inhale rattled like an animal crouched just beyond sight, waiting.

I couldn’t move. My body was nailed to the mattress, paralyzed, though not unfamiliar with this state. Somewhere in me, I knew I had felt this before, long ago, like a nightmare remembered only in fragments. My mind clawed for an answer buried deep, some instruction on how to fight it — but nothing surfaced.

Finally, with agonizing effort, I tilted my head. My eyes shot wide, darting to the corners of the room. I followed a rule my body seemed to already know: check the corners first.

That’s when I saw them.

Two eyes.

Huge, bright, and burning white in the blackness. They were fixed directly on me, unblinking, unmerciful, staring through me like they’d been waiting since the beginning of time for this exact moment.

My chest tightened. My head spun. I couldn’t tell if the dizziness came from fear or from the thing itself. The eyes never moved. They didn’t need to. Their stillness was worse than movement. Movement meant life. Stillness meant inevitability.

I tried to move my fingers, a pathetic attempt at defense, but my body betrayed me. Each second the eyes grew heavier on me, pressing into my ribs, weighing me down. My heart hammered, useless against the suffocating pressure.

The eyes belonged to something. I felt it. Not just a shape, not just shadow, but a presence — vast, ancient, and horribly familiar. Someone I had known once. Someone who had known me.

I didn’t dare look away, terrified that if I blinked it would be closer when my eyes opened again. The room ticked into silence, except for that breathing — ragged, monstrous, each inhale slicing into my ears until I wanted to scream.

Then, out of the corner of my vision, I noticed something wrong.

My legs. Too short. My arms, small and fragile. The bed ended at my feet. I twisted my head toward the mirror, and there it was — a child’s body staring back. My body. I was a child again.

When I looked back, there wasn’t just one shadow anymore. The second corner bloomed alive with another pair of eyes. And then there were two of them, watching me from opposite sides. I couldn’t lock onto both. I couldn’t keep up.

Fear chewed through me, tearing me open from the inside. My body trembled, my throat was dry, and yet, beneath all of it, something strange began to form. A thought, sharp as glass, quiet but insistent: stop fighting.

If I was going to die here, if they were going to crawl across the room and drag me into their darkness, then I wanted to face it. I wanted to feel it.

So I did something reckless. Something insane.

I smiled.

My mouth cracked open like old wood. My tongue was a desert, my lips shaking, but still I forced a smile and whispered into the black. Words, broken and trembling, but words nonetheless.

No answer came. Only breathing. Horrible, endless breathing that rattled the windows and pierced my skull. But after a moment — I realized I wasn’t as afraid. The longer I stared into those eyes, the less they seemed like strangers. Their silence wasn’t hostile. It was patient.

And I felt it — acceptance.

It spread slow, heavy, like warmth in winter, but not comfort. More like a fever. A weight that seeped into my bones and told me I could stop running. They weren’t gone, but they weren’t my enemy anymore. Their presence folded into me. Not merging, not consuming. Just existing. Breathing where I breathed, bleeding where I bled. They had been the ones clawing at me in the dark all these years, the reason I couldn’t sleep, the reason my chest burned with dread at night. But now, sitting in this fear, letting it devour me without resistance, they became something else.

Guardians.

Not holy, not kind, but guardians all the same. They didn’t vanish. They didn’t leave. They remained in the corners, watching, pulsing with a life I could not name. Not protectors in the human sense — but something older, stranger. Companions bound not by choice, but by necessity.

And it struck me with a clarity so sharp it hurt:

The things we fight the hardest — the darkness, the demons, the shadows — are often the very things that could keep us alive. We mistake their presence for punishment, when in truth, they are the unspoken truths of ourselves. We spend years burying them, fearing them, denying their bloodline to us. But what is denied does not die. It waits. And in its waiting, it sharpens its teeth.

Only when I stopped resisting did I see it: the shadows were not against me. They were me. The cast-off thoughts, the raw hungers, the unspoken griefs. The monsters I swore were foreign were, in fact, the oldest parts of myself — too primal to articulate, too necessary to erase.

And in their terrible patience, they revealed their secret.

That survival is not purity. It is not light without stain. Survival is union with the darkness we carry, a pact struck in silence: I will not abandon you, if you do not abandon me.

The shadows did not love me. They never would. But they would never leave me either.

And maybe love had never been the point. Maybe presence — relentless, unshakable presence — was something deeper. A darker form of loyalty.

From that night on, I was never alone in the dark again.

And for the first time, the darkness wasn’t a curse. It was a language. A mirror. A home.