Echoes of Queen

   “If you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche I have loved this quote for years before I understood it. It was beautiful. Mysterious. Haunting. It sat in my Notes app, in random captions, in the quiet corners of my mind. Oh, I loved how Nietzsche played with words. I admired the quote without fully grasping it. Until it became something I had lived through instead of something I had simply admired. Now I understand it the way you understand a scar, not from reading about it, but from touching it. Here's what nobody tells you about trauma: You do not just carry it. If you're not careful, you start to become the shape of it. The Fear That Built the Very Thing I Feared I used to tell myself, almost like a prayer, that I would never become my trauma. I said it to myself in the mirror. I said it in my journal. I said it every time an old wound tried to resurface. I refuse to become this. But fear does something strange when you feed ...

His name is Elias At 5:30 am, his phone alarm rang like it always did, and he turned it off without looking. He remembered nothing of the night before, nothing of the crash that would mark the rest of his life. It was raining hard. The roads slick, the headlights blinding. He and his father were driving home from a late meeting. Laughter had filled the car moments before. He could still feel the warmth of his father’s hand on his shoulder. Then the other car came, too fast, out of control. Metal screamed. Glass shattered. Pain, sharp and unrelenting, ripped through him. The world tilted, flipped, and became darkness. When the paramedics arrived, his father was trapped. Iron pinned him in his seat, legs broken, chest pressed against the twisted frame. He begged them between gasps, tears streaking the rain:  “My son, save my son first… please, make sure he’s okay…” Elias doesn’t remember consciousness, only flashes: the sound of the rescue tools, the screeching metal, the world movin...