When the night finally released me, it did not give me back to myself gently.
It dropped me at the edge of morning, shaking, incoherent, my body already failing in quiet ways I didn’t yet understand.
By the time I reached the hospital, the woods were gone—but the damage had followed me in.
The police stood over me first. Their faces were careful, professional, tense. They looked at my skin the way people do when they are trying to assemble a story without asking questions. They suspected human trafficking. That was the word that floated around me, heavy and clinical, as if it could explain why my body looked the way it did.
They photographed me.
Flash after flash. Bruises. Abrasions. Dirt ground into places dirt doesn’t usually stay. My legs trembled uncontrollably. My mouth wouldn’t form sentences that made sense. I tried to tell them something about the night, about the running, about the pressure that never touched me but somehow broke me anyway—but the words wouldn’t line up.
I wasn’t coherent.
Fear returned then—not the wild, mythic fear of the woods, but a smaller, colder one. I tried to leave. My body moved before my mind could reason with it. I stood, pulled away, tried to escape the room like it was another clearing I had to outrun.
They stopped me.
Hands on my arms. My shoulders. The bed behind my knees. I remember the moment my back hit the mattress—how final it felt. Straps came next. Wrists. Ankles. Chest. The restraints were methodical, impersonal, tight enough to remind me I no longer controlled what happened next.
I screamed. Or maybe I didn’t. I don’t remember clearly.
Two injections followed. One was Haldol. The other burned going in, heavy and immediate. The room tilted. The lights smeared. My thoughts slowed until they could no longer argue.
They kept me sedated for days.
My body had been pushed too far. Running for hours under terror had torn muscle from the inside. Rhabdomyolysis, they called it—my muscles breaking down into my bloodstream. My heart had faltered under the strain. A heart attack, quiet but real, folded into my chart like a footnote to madness.
The demons didn’t need claws.
They hurt me by driving me past my limits.
By turning survival into endurance.
By convincing my body there was no safe place to stop.
When I woke again—truly woke—the night was gone. The woods were gone. The demons had lost their voices. What remained was a hospital room, beeping machines, soreness so deep it felt geological, and the strange, disorienting knowledge that something invisible had left very visible scars.
Later, people would debate what was real. What I imagined. What my mind filled in to survive what my body couldn’t explain.
But my injuries did not argue.
They proved that fear can be physical. That terror can leave fingerprints. That a body can be pushed into collapse without ever being touched.
The demons did not follow me out of the hospital.
They stayed behind in the night, where stories belong—named, contained, and no longer in charge.
