The Screams They don’t sound like memory. They sound like now. They come when the house is quiet and my body mistakes silence for danger. Sleep feels like a breach. Every time I cross the threshold something yanks me back not yet, not safe, stay sharp. I wake up exhausted from guarding nothing. From fighting wars that no longer have coordinates. The screams don’t ask permission. They don’t explain themselves. They just arrive and leave me staring at the ceiling wondering how a man can be this tired and still unable to rest. Morning comes with no momentum. Just weight. Just the quiet shame of needing more time than the world is willing to give. And yet I rise anyway, moving through the rooms like a man trying not to wake a sleeping beast that lives only in his nerves. I make breakfast with hands that remember battles my mind can’t name. I button a shirt over a chest that still feels the concussion of impact. People say it’s over now, as if time were a solvent strong enough to dissolve vigilance. As if the body didn’t keep its own calendar. But some days, in the small mercy between breaths, I feel the faintest shift a loosening, a letting go, a moment where the air doesn’t taste like warning. And I hold onto that. Not as a promise, but as proof that even a haunted system can learn a different rhythm. That one day quiet might mean quiet again.