There’s a deep, miserable despair when you’ve been pushing yourself hard, finally get some time off to sleep, and find yourself snatching only hours before nightmares shake you awake. A psychological ambush (just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water) places that should be safe (bed, sleep, your own mind) turn out to be full of monsters. It’s exhausting. Here in the night you remember that you’re wounded too, and without the day, without the structures of the day,the frameworks and suggestions and strategies that belong to the daylight world, there is instead poetry and terror.

There is no betrayal yet I feel betrayed. That rest does not await me, that I do not sleep the sound sleep of the innocent, that there is more to ask of me yet and more to endure. But this is the place where I go to the underworld, and mine is stuffed with nightmares and horrors. This is the price to pay for the daylight hours.