Dark Passenger
At night, the dark passenger climbs in. No knock. No warning. Just weight. Ribs rattling. Lungs on fire. Heart hammering hard enough to want out. Not a voice, a pressure. Not a thought, a fist. It sits on my chest and turns the air thick until every breath is a fight against something I cannot see and cannot move. My skin feels too tight. My head fills with static. Reason disappears. And I am burning alive inside a body that looks perfectly still. I tell myself it is only a memory, only fear, only the past dragging its dirty boots across the floor of the present. But the body does not care what year it is. The body remembers. So I reach for the bottle, because sometimes I’d rather feel poisoned than terrified. Because numbness, even for a few hours, can feel dangerously close to peace. I drink to shut it up, to slow the heart, to soften the edges, to make the room stop closing in. But the dark passenger drinks too. It sits beside me, patient as death. Watching the glass empty, knowing it hasn’t gone anywhere. It never needs an invitation. It knows where I sleep. Some nights, I hate it. Some nights, I hate myself for still being afraid of it. And some nights, all I can do is stay there, sweating, shaking, furious, breathing badly through the flames, and just wait for morning to prove that I survived it again.