The nights do not end. The mornings do not begin.
Safety—what that is, they do not know.
Sleeping deeply—they do not know what it feels like.
These are voices from inside people raised in abuse. Voices that have been carried, in silence, for a long time.
Inside a Day That Never Ends
In the middle of the night, woken up without warning. Lectured by a parent. Made to clean the house. Exhausted, and still unable to sleep.
“I had been a child who couldn’t sleep, even back in kindergarten”—the realization came much later. The teeth were worn down from grinding. The back teeth, ruined from a kind of brushing no one had ever taught them, were already in pieces.
If someone who grew up in an ordinary home tries to imagine what “a day that does not end” or “the strain, the exhaustion, the unease” feel like, consider, for instance, a sudden disaster. Evacuated to a gymnasium with no partitions and no privacy, public order breaking down, surrounded by other people’s irritation and fatigue and tension—living that way, for weeks, for months, with no end in sight. Even those who have never lived through it can, perhaps, imagine that sleep does not come easily.
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