Ten steps back to where the vision began.

There’s a wolf that keeps visiting me at night. One that finds space between a breath and a thought and wedges itself through. I try to ignore it and continue to abandon the soft spot in my garden I’ve been digging into — even when it hovers over my shoulder and tries to find my evasive gaze just so I’d find the courage to continue what I’ve started.

Sometimes it shifts. Transforms. 

Some days, it morphs into a vaguely familiar face I thought I’ve long forgotten, taps my shoulder with that same persistent air that clogs up my lungs until I’m heaving out all the things I’ve left to rot somewhere in the pit of my stomach. Some days, it looks like my father sitting in the driver’s seat, sometimes in the bones of my house with no windows and doors, with the same words that still echo somewhere in the depths of my memory.

No matter its form, I find myself frozen. Stuck in the same muck that makes seconds feel unbearable, a flood that has already subsided but left ruins and a muddied aftermath I’m too terrified to sift through.

Is the garden just my body…? Is the wolf just a shadow—my shadow—I keep mistaking for a predator out to smother me?

I wonder when I’ll learn to find the courage to finally look at it in the eyes to find the answer.