Chapter 9
When every day is about survival, your sense of time starts to collapse.
Days stopped feeling like separate things; they blurred together into a stretch of existence where the only thing that marked time was repetition, and repetition has a way of changing meaning.
The first time something happens, it shocks you.
The second time, you question it.
The third, you begin to expect it.
By the time I turned thirteen, there was no longer a question of if. Only when? And eventually, how often?
It didn’t stay contained to the night. At some point, without announcement, the boundary dissolved.
Afternoons began to carry the same dread as evenings.
The same pressure beneath the surface. The same sense that something would unfold regardless of whether I was ready for it or not. Routine expanded.
What used to be something that waited for darkness started existing in daylight, and that changes a person in ways that are difficult to explain.
Because night lets you pretend things belong to a different version of reality.
Daylight doesn’t offer that. Daylight forces everything into the same world where you eat, breathe, move, and exist. There’s no separation, just…
continuity. And when something becomes continuous, it stops feeling like an event and becomes an environment instead.
By fourteen, I no longer reacted the way I used to.
My mind had begun to reorganize itself. There are only so many ways a body can respond before it starts choosing efficiency over resistance.
I stopped anticipating it as something external; instead it became internal.
A constant state rather than a moment.
My thoughts changed. They moved slower, but cut deeper.
There were long stretches of time where I felt like I was observing myself from a distance.
Watching my own movements the same way I used to watch other people.
Detached. As if I had become another environment to study.
My body didn’t feel like mine anymore, not in the way it used to.
It was… accessible, available. Something that existed for use rather than ownership, and that realization didn’t come with panic; it came with something far worse.
Acceptance.
It was a Friday when the familiar routine broke.
The afternoon had felt no different from any other.
The same house, the same light falling through the windows, the same emptiness that wasn’t really empty.
I was in the living room on the sofa, Krystyna bouncing on top of me.
Everything was following the pattern it had followed so many times before that my mind had stopped marking it as something separate.
Everything went down in the usual rhythm, but then the door opened, and from there, everything happened too fast. That’s the only honest way to describe it.
A presence where there wasn’t supposed to be one.
Both our heads turned at the same time toward the doorway, and there he was.
Bartosz.
He didn’t look surprised. As if something he had already known had finally decided to reveal itself.
Everything after that fractured.
Movements without sequence and sound without structure. Krystyna jumped off the couch, leaving me completely exposed, grabbing a blanket to cover herself. “No, Bartosz, please, listen to me, you don’t understand–”
Her voice broke apart on his name.
She clutched the blanket tighter around herself, knuckles pale beneath the fabric, her whole body folding inward like she could somehow make herself smaller. Disappear inside it.
“It wasn’t– this isn't what you think!”
Her words stumbled over each other, tripping, desperate to reach him before he reached me.
“I was helping him, I was trying to teach him, he doesn’t know anything, I was just–” She swallowed hard, breath catching, eyes flicking toward me for a fraction of a second before snapping back to Bartosz.
“He pushed me, he wanted, he wouldn’t stop–”
The lie landed in the room like something alive. Constructed in real time out of panic and survival.
“I tried to stop it, I swear, Bartosz, please–”
She stepped toward him then, just one step, hands trembling as they reached out like she thought she could touch her way out of what he had just seen. He didn’t even look at her. Like she had already stopped existing the moment he walked through the door.
He moved, and when he did, the air shifted with him, heavy and compressed. Every step he took forward erased something from the room. The illusion that this could be explained. Krystyna’s hands found his arm.
“Please, just let me–”
A single movement of his shoulder, his arm, his weight, enough to send her back into the wall behind her. The sound was dull. Her body hit, slid, and collapsed.
The blanket stayed clutched around her as she dropped, her breath breaking into something rough and uneven, the apology dissolving into quiet animal sounds.
Still pleading, still trying, but weaker now.
Because she understood something I hadn't fully grasped, that she was no longer the focus.
He was in front of me, too fast, too close. I didn’t move. My body hadn’t caught up yet. There’s a delay, sometimes, between seeing something and understanding what it means.
The first hit didn’t hurt the way you’d expect. It didn't make everything clear; instead, it disoriented me. A cutting, bright interruption that erased everything else for a second. Sound disappeared until the only thing I could hear was my pulse trying to escape my body.
My head snapped to the side, the room tilting with it, the world briefly losing its structure before slamming back into place. I didn’t have time to recover; there was no space for that.
The second came before the first had finished existing, and then another.
And another.
And another.
Each one landing with intent, not emotion. That’s what made it worse. This wasn’t the rage I thought I saw in his eyes, it was correction.
I fell. Knees first, then hands. Then the rest followed.
The floor came up faster than I expected, hard beneath me, knocking everything else into place.
I tried to push myself up, but his foot connected with my side before I could.
Air left my body in a sound I didn’t recognize as mine, and suddenly breathing became…
optional. Something my body forgot how to do.
You learn very quickly what you’re capable of at fourteen.
And more importantly, what you’re not.
There is no version of this where I could have fought him.
No hidden strength waiting to reveal itself. That’s something stories lie about. They tell you that under enough pressure, something rises, something powerful. Maybe sometimes they do, but that wasn’t the case for me; nothing rose.
I folded.
The kicks came slower, because force was no longer necessary. Each one landed with just enough force that another would’ve been excessive, but he delivered it anyway.
Again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
My body reacted at first, flinching, turning, trying to protect something, anything. But there are only so many times you can react before reaction becomes pointless.
I ended up on my back. Then my side. Then somewhere in between.
Position stopped mattering; nothing I did changed the outcome, so eventually I stopped doing anything. I just lay there and let it happen.
Pain turned into something else after that. It wasn’t sudden anymore. Stopped being something I could locate. It spread, everywhere at once. A dull, overwhelming presence that blurred the edges of everything, and inside that, I remember thinking, this is it. This is how it ends.
It’s strange what the mind does when it believes it’s about to die. It doesn’t always reach for life; sometimes it simply lets go of it.
I remember noticing how still it felt inside my head all of a sudden.
No racing thoughts, no panic, just a single and almost peaceful realization unfolding in the background.
If it ends here, then it stops.
Everything.
The nights, the constant presence of something I could never escape. It would all just… end. And for a moment, that didn’t feel like loss.
You understand that, don’t you, little Ghost?
That dangerous little shift where the idea of disappearing doesn’t feel like fear but relief. You’ve brushed against that thought before. I can tell. People like you don’t stay this long without understanding something at a deeper level.
The blows slowed down, then stopped. Like a storm running out of force rather than choosing to end. The room returned in small broken pieces. Sound first. My own breathing, uneven and shallow. Then the heaviness of my body against the floor, then the space around me.
Krystyna was still somewhere in the room, still crying.
He stood there for a moment. I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t. I think some part of me understood that eye contact would mean something, and I had nothing left to give. Time passed. I don’t know how long, but it was long enough for the room to settle as well as it could manage.
Healing came later, if you can call it that. Bruises fading, skin repairing itself, movement returning slowly and reluctantly. But healing is a misleading word. Because nothing returned to what it had been. Something new had been introduced. Not just pain, but another routine.
He never stopped punishing me. That’s the simplest truth.
Bartosz didn’t forget, and he didn’t move on. He responded to it.
Again.
And again.
Not every day, but often enough that my body began to pick up on the signs before it happened. The way the house sounded when he had been drinking more than usual. Violence became part of the structure, just like everything else. For a while, the nights with Krystyna changed.
She didn’t come in like she used to. The space she used to occupy remained empty, and in that absence, something almost felt like… a pause. Like the house was holding itself in a different kind of tension. But nothing really disappears; it just becomes something else.
It started slowly again after a few months.
Krystyna visited me in my room at night like she used to. Late, when the house was certain Bartosz wouldn’t wake. When his breathing had settled into that heavy, unreachable depth. And just like that, everything returned. Not as it had been, but alongside something new.
That’s the thing about deterioration.
It doesn’t replace what was there; it adds to it. Layer by layer, until one day you realize, there is no part of your life that isn’t shaped by it. That was the version of life I learned to exist inside.
I never really questioned it or fought it; It was just something I adjusted to the way the body adjusts to pain when it realizes it’s not temporary.
It’s strange how quickly that happens. How something unbearable, over time, becomes familiar.
Not easier, never easier, just known. And there’s a certain kind of comfort in knowing what to expect, even when what you expect is wrong.
I stopped reacting.
From the outside, it might have even looked like peace. Like I had finally settled. But you and I both know that I had just learned where to place everything inside myself so it didn’t show.
I have to say, there’s something about you, little Ghost.
Most people would have stepped back by now.
Closed the page. Told themselves this isn’t for them.
Because it’s too much, too heavy, maybe even too real.
But you didn’t. That kind of curiosity… It has consequences.
Because the longer you stay here with me, the harder it becomes to separate what’s mine from what starts to feel like yours, and we’re not even close to the end yet.
There are things I haven’t told you.
Things I didn’t understand back then.
Things that didn’t make sense until much later. Like the way the house began to feel… different. A sound somewhere there hadn’t been one before. Footsteps that didn’t match the patterns I knew. A presence that didn’t belong to either Bartosz or Krystyna.
I remember noticing it the way you notice something in the corner of your eye, but don’t turn your head.
Not because you’re not curious, no, but because something in you already knows that once you look, you don’t get to pretend it wasn’t there.
You’ll see what I mean. Soon. So stay close, little Ghost, you’ve come too far to lose me here.