Echo

Echo
Nightmares come at night like unpaid debts.
Knocking softly at first, then louder when you pretend not to hear.
They say!
Face your truth, so you do.
You sit with it, the broken memory, the almost-love, the words you swallowed because they would have changed everything.
You open your eyes in the dark
and whisper,
“I see you now.”
But still!
The same nightmare returns.
Why?
You faced the truth.
You named it.
You held it in your bare hands until it stopped shaking.
And yet!
it comes back, wearing the same face, standing in the same doorway of your sleep.
Maybe confronting reality is not the same
as accepting it.
Maybe somewhere beneath your everyday smile, beneath the “I’m fine,” beneath the rhythm of routine, there is a quieter voice
refusing to agree.
You say!
everything is going well.
But your dreams are not convinced.
They replay the scene.
Not because you are weak, not because you are blind, but because some part of you
still negotiates with what happened.
Still wishes the ending bent differently.
Still rewrites the script in the privacy of night.
Maybe the nightmare persists because deep down, you did not want the lesson, you wanted a different outcome.
And that is not failure.
That is grief, with the mask of fear.
That is hope, that has not fully let go.
So the dream returns,
not to haunt you,
but to ask,
Have you accepted it?
Or are you only surviving it?
And somewhere between
your waking courage
and your sleeping truth,
your heart
is still deciding.