Many nights I spend running, hiding, bleeding, weeping, suffocating, shattering, dying. I claw my way out through my eyes, my throat, escaping my own shallow grave with cracked fingernails and stinging eyes – tense every limb to not jolt, or the nightmare that follows me into reality may notice I have woken. But a natural sleeper is not tense as though laying in a stiff, cold coffin instead of a bed. It always knows. I try to snatch my breath back from the air before it is stolen by the footsteps approaching my door. Squeeze my eyes shut. They fly open of their own accord. Dart around the empty room – looming chair, lumps of pillows on the floor, cracks in the closet, blinking charger, glaring digital clock against blinds pulled too far past the window, no shadows where they shouldn’t be. Maybe. Flinch shut again as slowly, deliberately, the footsteps reach my door. Silence. House settling. Pry my hands open before the little scythe marks become permanent and strangle my sheets instead. Breaths come and go, little flitting moths unable to find light. I work my jaw open like a rusted hinge and force out a thin melody through the thick air. “Our God is Greater,” Chris Tomlin. Warbling. Whimpering. Chewy. Body clamped to the bed. The phantom haunts my doorframe, malicious and menacing and impossible to ignore in its sheer will, even without moving, even without howling or cackling the way I am sure it wants to, the way it did in my nightmares. It slavers savagely against my desperate prayers. My teeth grind from the terror of keeping my eyes closed, so I open them again but refuse to look anywhere but the sharp line where my wall meets my ceiling, battling against nothing except it is the most real something until at last I fall into restless, exhausted slumber. In my dreams, golden threads weave into a net and lower themselves around my room. The dreadful footsteps at my doorway never pass the spirit light in my mind’s eye. I still do not look until at last I stop hearing them.