I woke with a gasp. I could see the doctors turning into wolves, holding me down with syringes in their hands as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. My eyes automatically flew to my right forearm with the rope tattoo and the text ‘Don’t let your fears control you.’ Taking a couple of deep breaths while I chanted ‘don’t let your fears control you’ for several minutes to calm the storm inside of me. When my breathing and heart rate had slowed down, and the uncomfortable feeling had vanished, I looked at the clock. It was only 7:32 a.m. Val was sound asleep next to me. But I was actually fully awake now after chanting for several minutes. It had been so long since the last nightmare from… that time… I was just glad it was this late. I moved closer to her, slowly, so I wouldn’t wake her. She needed her rest. Now I was lying against her back, I carefully put my arm around her and buried my nose in her hair. She still hadn’t moved or reacted, so I gave her a squeeze a

Val suddenly stopped. “Look.” She whispered and pointed to the right. There were three deer’s, grazing lazily. It had only been half an hour since sunrise. “They haven’t seen us.” I smiled at her. One of them looked up at us, I saw its muzzle move in small jerks, like it was sniffing for scents in the air, and then they ran off. I wanted to talk to her about yesterday. But I didn’t know where to begin. But I wanted to get better at giving her air, understand her, talk to her without the words gets stuck in my throat and strangle me. I wanted her to tell me how she feels instead of giving me that face and pull away from me. When she pulls away from me, like last night where she said she needed some time alone and didn’t want to share the tent, I felt that tightening around my chest. The… choking feeling. I didn’t want that, I had enough shit to deal with already. The growing guilt for starters. How do I get her to talk to me? And how do I tell her t