Dear all the nightmares:
Please just leave me alone.
Please stop visiting me, night after night, searing more pain into my brain as I am forced into a corner, eyes unable to shut, while he has sex with a girl who embodies all of my insecurities. Stop the slow pan over her, with her long, thin legs and her washboard abs; her perfect smile, tan skin and long blonde hair. Stop. Please, God. Please stop.
Stop shoving me in the corner and holding me there as I scream until I'm hoarse and he never once hears me, or even looks up at me, because his eyes are on her. Oh, how he enjoys her. He kisses down her neck in the same ways he used to kiss me but he seems so much more satisfied with her--this ghost. She represents all of the women he cheated on me with, but somehow looks only like the woman I always wished I could resemble. She is a figment of societal expectations, supermodels and actresses all airbrushed and photoshopped with their best features collected for the sake of creating the perfect woman. She doesn't even exist, but oh, how she taunts me.
Stop visiting me. Please.
Stop visiting me with pictures of girls he will move on with, and love better than he ever loved me. Girls that he fights for, and chooses, instead of me. Girls that he changes for--but not me. Never me. Stop with the torture that echoes all the ways I am not, and never have been, enough for him.
None of the girls he moves on with when you haunt me look like the seductive ghost that laid beneath him, none of them are half as beautiful, and yet they hurt me even more. You sell me a narrative in which he sees them as worthy, and he changes for them. These are your worst tactics--because you convince me with this trick that he desires them, and he never had any desire for me. He gives them his best because he wants to be the best he can be for them. Not for me, though. I was only worthy of his worst and most destructive behavior. With me, he was only a ticking time bomb. You tell me that I am nothing but a casualty.
Stop making me afraid to go to work because I'm convinced I'll get fired; that his mother who surely hates me by now because she thinks I hurt her child will tell me to leave and never return. His mother, who cried when we broke up, who thinks I hurt her family; who thinks her son would never do something like this, but refused to look at the evidence. She doesn't want you, you hiss. She never wanted you. She will never forgive you for what she thinks you did to her son.
You tell me I was never enough, and I will never be enough. That I will never find a mother-in-law who loves me, or a man who will fight for me. That I am completely unworthy of love in every capacity. You haunt me when I rest with lies and accusations, like dark tendrils of smoke trying to grasp me and carry me down into hell.
Let me tell you, though: you will never win.
You won't win because you always lose out to the dreams, where an angel shakes me from my terror-induced stupor and hands me a sword. Fight, he tells me. Fight for the promises God has poured into your heart. So, I fight--I fight you, and the demons that reside in you, and the sums of all my fears because I know that God has made me strong; brave.
In my dreams, in the midst of the fight I realize that I have mounted up with wings like eagles.
In my dreams, I see Jesus fighting for me.
Foolish nightmares, don't you know when you have lost? You may tell me that the boy I love will never fight for me, but my dreams tell me the truth: That the God Who loves me will always fight for me.
He has always been more than enough for me.
I will not succumb to any of your empty threats and daunting fear. I will mount up with wings like eagles.
Dear nightmares: You will never defeat my dreams. You will never defeat the God of my reality.
Soli Deo Gloria!