Waves of a Broken Man

John woke up in a cold sweat, his nightmare clinging to him like a suffocating second skin. He could still feel the lingering pressure, the dread seeping into his bones as if he hadn't truly escaped it, even in the waking world. The darkness around him was thick, almost tangible, pressing in from every angle. His phone lay just out of reach on the nightstand. He reached for it, his fingers trembling as they brushed the screen. Time—he needed to know time, as if it would bring him clarity, or at least some sense of control. His limbs felt heavy, as though the night's terror had taken root in his body, trapping him.

He dragged himself out of bed, stumbling toward the bathroom. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead, harsh against the quiet stillness. He stopped in front of the mirror, his gaze meeting his reflection with an uncomfortable familiarity. For a moment, he stared at himself—not as a man, but as the sum of everything he had been. This was his face, yet it wasn't. It felt like looking at a stranger who wore his history like a shroud. The boy he had been, the man he had become—they were connected, but the distance between them was unbridgeable. The scars of his past were etched into his eyes, and no amount of time could erase them.

John had always thought there would be a moment—a moment when he'd wake up and feel different. Free. The kind of freedom that came from shedding his past like old skin, from escaping the ghosts that had followed him for years. But that day never came. No matter how far he ran, no matter how much he changed, the past was relentless. It was like a wound that never quite healed, an ache that would never go away, no matter how many years passed.

As a child, John had clung to the idea that his mother, Amber, was invincible—she was his Superman, always there to protect him. She was the one who shielded him from the darkness, from the things that waited in the night, things he could never fully understand. She kept the world safe, even as it crumbled around them. His real father—gone before John had even reached his sixth birthday—left a hole in his life that Ron, his stepfather, could never fill. But Ron tried. By day, he was just a man—a man who didn't always know how to be the father John needed. But by night, when the bottle took control, Ron became someone else. Someone dangerous.

The violence was never a surprise. It came in waves—predictable, unrelenting. By the time dinner was on the table, the tension was already thick in the air. It wasn't the arguments that scared John, though. It was the quiet after the shouting stopped—the silence that crept in just before things would break. It was always the same: the shouts, the crashes, his mother's terrified voice echoing through the house. And John, just a boy, helpless in his own bed, could do nothing but lie there, frozen, wishing he could be the hero she needed him to be. But how could he protect her when he was so small, so powerless?

Allentown, New York, was a town where secrets didn't stay hidden for long. It was a place that pretended to offer warmth, but swallowed its own truth whole. A town where everyone knew everyone's business, and no one had the luxury of privacy. John had always known that his family's secrets—his mother's secrets—would eventually catch up to him. But he never wanted to know the truth. He never wanted to be part of the whispers that filled the streets. But privacy was a luxury no one in Allentown could afford. And eventually, those secrets found their way back to him, uninvited, like ghosts crawling through the cracks of his life, always there, just out of reach.

Growing up around Ron's family, John always felt like an outsider. He wasn't just "not one of them." He was the secret—an uncomfortable truth that no one dared speak aloud. As the years passed, he began to understand that he wasn't just the product of his parents' mistakes. He was their curse. The boy who carried their silence. The boy who wore their shame. He tried to outrun it, tried to become someone else, but no matter what he did, it always followed him.

And now, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, John realized that no matter how much he had changed, the past was still there, lingering just beneath the surface. The boy he had been—the boy he had tried so desperately to leave behind—was still there, watching him. And the truth was, no matter how far he went, he would never escape the shadow of who he had once been. He could never escape the weight of the things that had happened, the things he had never been able to control.

The boy was still there. Always there. And maybe he always would be.