Down the Rabbit Hole (V2) Night drops like a ruck you never asked to carry again heavy, familiar, tight on the lungs. The house is quiet, but your body isn’t. Your pulse is on patrol. Your spine is listening for a sound that isn’t coming and still, you’re braced. The ceiling becomes a sky you don’t trust. The dark becomes a map you’ve bled on before. You shut your eyes and the world doesn’t fade it loads. Like a hard drive of ghosts spinning up, like a radio signal finding its channel. And then you’re gone. Not outward. Not visibly. Just… gone inward. Falling. Down the rabbit hole where gravity doesn’t mean physics it means memory. It means your mind yanking the cord and dragging you back through the places you survived but never left. You feel it in the body first: that split-second ignition adrenaline, jaw clench, hands tight, a breath you can’t finish. The animal part of you wakes up, the part that learned how to live by staying ready, how to love by staying guarded, how to sleep with one eye open even when both are closed. You can’t tell what time it is. Because time doesn’t work right in the hole. A decade ago feels like now. A smell becomes a doorway. A sound becomes a siren. A thought becomes a trigger you can’t un-pull. You start counting exits in a room you’re already safe in. You start listening for footsteps in a house that isn’t hostile. But your nervous system doesn’t believe in safe. It believes in next. And the hole opens wider. You see faces you buried. You hear voices that never made it home. You feel your own decisions crawl out of the dark and sit beside you like they still have jurisdiction. The mind runs the replay like it’s trying to punish you into being perfect. Every “what if” becomes a blade. Every “I should’ve” becomes a round you chamber again and again and again. This isn’t sadness. This is warfare with no uniform, no front line, no ceasefire. A slow ambush that waits until you’re alone to strike. Sleep comes close and then flinches away because closing your eyes feels like surrender, and surrender was never part of the job. So you stay awake. Not because you want to because something in you still thinks you’re responsible for keeping the world from falling apart. You grind your teeth like you’re chewing through steel. You hold your breath like oxygen is a privilege. You scan the shadows like they owe you answers. And the worst part the worst part is you know exactly what this is. You’ve named it. You’ve studied it. You’ve fought it. You’ve won against it a thousand times. But it keeps coming back like a war that found your address. Down the rabbit hole, the silence turns violent. Not loud but sharp. The kind of quiet where you can hear your own mind loading magazines of regret. And you start wondering how someone can survive so much and still feel so damn close to losing themselves. But even in that place even in the pit, even in the spiral there’s a flicker. Not hope like a movie. Not peace like a slogan. Just a small, stubborn thing that refuses to die. A nerve. A spark. A last line of defense. The part of you that didn’t quit overseas, and won’t quit here either. So you breathe ugly, shallow, through clenched ribs but you breathe. You grip the edge of the night like it’s a ledge. You don’t “heal” in one moment. You endure. You stay. You ride it out until the hole gets bored of failing to kill you. Because you’ve been through worse than your own darkness. And you’re still here. Still standing guard over what matters. Still alive when the past tries to recruit you back into the war. Down the rabbit hole you fall… but you don’t disappear. You don’t vanish. You come back up with dirt under your nails and your name still intact.