Dead of Winter

by Darcy Coates

The thought is circling me like a vulture.

Each day felt like a fight to earn the right to be happy, and they were fights I lost more often than won.

feared that I was going to kill our relationship. My anxieties and the crippling doubts and the everyday struggle would wear on him, drag him down, slowly drain the joy he seemed to hold in life.

Too relatable

An irrational kind of desperation falls over me. The idea that I might still be able to fix this somehow. Unwind the badness. Repair the damage. If I can only understand.

Literally me with every trauma.

Solitude is the best thing he can give me.

All I can offer is doubts.

Girl. Same.

I can credit my father for a lot of things. A hyper-developed ability to read others’ body language, a hatred of hard liquor, a mistrust of people who indulge in it.

It’s a very different kind of fear to the sharp tang of terror I felt in the shed with Denny. This is slower, slicker. The kind that clouds my head instead of clearing it. Numbs instead of energises.

But old scars sometimes peel back open and weep fresh blood.

“That would be a mistake. To believe too much in anyone’s innocence, I mean.”

Simone spent four years of her life feeling like she didn’t belong to herself. And now she’s willing to fight—furiously, viciously—to not lose that control ever again.

The paranoia is eating at me. I need clarity.

Oh, the woes of the anxious mind!

I can the feel tiredness like a physical pressure, pulling on the skin on my face, causing everything to droop. At the same time, anxiety prickles like a thousand needles jabbing inside my chest, forcing me to stay alert.

I’m terrified to think of how much more the universe will take before it’s satisfied.

But it’s just that. Hope. And hope cannot be relied on.

Hope cannot be relied on. But sometimes we still need it to survive.

Hope and doubt run like dual currents in my veins,