(Trigger Warning: briefly graphic discussion of rape and suicidal ideation, mild mentions of self-harm.)

I have insomnia in the summertime. It started towards the end of my teen years, when I began to process the abuse I’d endured at the hands of one of my father’s friends. I feel like it was all of the sudden, but it was probably gradual. Hot, humid nights became moments frozen in time, a summer relived in the dark. I stare unblinking at the wall, the ceiling, my own balled-up fists.

When he raped me, I didn’t know what sex was. I knew how babies were made, but I didn’t know the context. I knew about my ovaries, but I didn’t know what my outside parts were called, didn’t know how to describe to my mother what he did to me under the covers. I just knew he thought I was smart, the smartest young lady he’d ever met, wise beyond my years at the tender, chubby-cheeked age of 12.

It went on all summer. He’d touch, sometimes hurt, and I’d wonder about why adults did these things but I didn’t have anyone I could ask. My mother would slap me for talking nasty, if I tried. So I didn’t try.

Every year, it’s the same. Before I even notice how the nights have gotten sticky, how the heat of the afternoon carries well into midnight, I stop being able to fall asleep. Restless energy stirs beneath my sweat, but it’s never usable – it’s just the jitters, the kind of nervousness that keeps the brain on but won’t move the rest of the body.

I scroll my phone.

I stare at my fucking nightlight until my eyes ache with how badly I want to blink. But if I blink, I see something worse than the wall. Worse than the ceiling.

I wish, for a frantic moment, that I could be dead.

Dead would mean free of this recycled hell, manifested in damp sheets tangling around my heavy limbs, the rotten taste of my dried-out mouth, the irritating tickle of sweat that rolls searing into my open eye.

It hurts so much more than it should. Hurts enough to make me start crying, clenching my teeth and digging my fingernails into my arms to keep myself quiet. I don’t want my partner’s comfort. Their consoling would only chafe my nerves.

I go back to my phone. I try to direct my exhausted, anxiously roving focus on an article, a fanfic, a new follower’s feed.

I cry again. It’s fucking useless and just makes my ever-present migraine worse, but maybe worse is better. Maybe the pain will kill me.

When I do pass out, I have nightmares so vivid that for days afterward I can feel his dry, probing fingers on my body and the wiry scrape of his beard on my skin. I can smell his unwashed skin, sour from the heat. It creeps into daylight at random, robs me of my brief reprieve. I want to kick and tear it away, force it back into the dark where it belongs.

This is the kind of talking nasty I do now, in my own head, in the middle of the night. I fantasize about something rupturing in the time machine that is my brain. I fantasize about my heart being fatally seized by the terror that rips me from eventual sleep. I fantasize bout dying instantly instead of feeling like I’m on the edge of it for hours that stretch into years that are only moments, remembered.

Wildly, I resent my partner for being my anchor to this hell, the reason I don’t just run barefoot onto the highway and burn my eyes with oncoming headlights like I do my nightlight.

Then I hate myself for all of it. Hate myself for not knowing better back then, and not knowing better now.

I wish I could turn the desperate, animalistic hatred I have in these moments onto my rapist, but I can’t. I never have.

Guess I’m not such a smart young lady after all.

On Friday, I’ll turn 29. In another month or so after that, the Florida heat will break, and as quickly as my insomnia came, it will go. I’ll lay down in bed with my phone, listening to my partner snoring behind me, and suddenly it will be morning and I’ll be rested. No more hellish hours spent suspended in time, and far fewer nightmares.

On Friday, the end of my insomnia will become tangible again. A thing I can experience, soon. On Friday, I can start thinking of this as another summer endured… and another summer survived.