Time Should Heal

Every night your restless dreams lead you back there again, and every night the wound is renewed. It’s been decades since your body walked in that hallowed place, the labyrinth carved and filled; decades since your skin felt the dripping heat and your stomach clenched at the smell of the dead saints and the stars wheeled above.

Time should heal wounds. The therapists certainly think so; they think you’re unhealthily obsessed, unwilling to let go, unwilling to let yourself grow beyond the memory. They blame you. They don’t understand. Each night the memory is made anew, each night you are once again the things which were done to you and the things which you did—the things you were made to do, they’d say. A small rephrasing. A lie.

Afterward, after it should have been over, you pinned the newspaper clippings to your mirror. Not all of them. The rescue. The trial. The obituary. The monster is dead, the children sing, and such a celebration we should have!

It helped, a bit.

It reminded you that what you saw in the mirror wasn’t real.

That was before the dreams started. It doesn’t help so much any more.

In the dreams his robes are woven from golden light, nothing like the grubby orange rags that draped his emaciated frame when they finally dragged him out, handcuffed and incoherent, that honeyed tongue ruined by the touch of cold iron. In the dreams his lips are always stained with fresh blood and galaxies whirl in his eyes; he is everything that he told you he was, everything that the drugs made him seem—and there is nothing, nothing at all, to contradict him.

You haven’t been sleeping much. Coffee and meth aren’t good for you, but they’re better than being back there. Better than feeling it all again, talking yourself in to making all those bad choices again. You tell your therapists it was all for survival, that they weren’t really choices, and they seem to understand, but …

It felt good.

And every time you sleep it feels good again.