The Empty Streets

Perhaps my PTSD has decided to change shape. For years, it behaved the way people expect such things to behave, with night terrors and sudden waking.

Bolting upright before the mind even understood where it was, and heart hammering. Darkness thick as wet wool, with the old animal instincts firing off alarms over ghosts nobody else can see.

At least those were honest, but this new thing is quieter and somehow meaner.

Yesterday I made the mistake of trying to behave like a responsible adult. I had gotten dehydrated earlier in the day, and listening to the endless chorus of modern health prophets who insist a man should drink water by the gallon or else dry up like a forgotten raisin behind God’s refrigerator.

So I drank over eight glasses of water. At my age, that is less a health decision and more a declaration of war against the bladder.

Sure enough, sometime after midnight, my prostate filed its formal complaint with management and hauled me out of bed the first time. I stumbled half-awake through the dark house, drank another little bit of water because apparently, I had become a hostage to wellness culture, and crawled back beneath the blankets.

Then I slipped directly back into the same dream. Not a nightmare exactly, no monsters or gunfire, and zero dramatic horror moving in the shadows.

Just streets, endless streets. Empty and destroyed.

The kind of streets where windows are gone, and papers drift along the pavement, and the silence itself feels abandoned. There were no people anywhere.

Just block after block of dead city under a gray sky that never quite becomes morning, and me wandering through it. Always moving, but never arriving.

I woke again an hour later, with frustration already waiting for me. Head aching slightly, mouth dry despite all the water, and my mind still half-trapped in that ruined place.

Then back to sleep and back to the streets. Five times this happened.

Each return to bed dropped me straight back into the same landscape as if my mind had become trapped in some terrible municipal zoning project, with the same intersections and empty buildings.

The same feeling that something awful had happened long ago, and everyone else had already left.

I remain uncertain whether to call them dreams or nightmares. The latter usually contains panic, but these contain something akin to being lost, which is the difference.

Therein is my frustration. I knew my compass points, which is to say I could tell north from south and east from west, but I could never find the outskirts of the city.

The strange thing about PTSD is that people imagine it remains frozen in one form forever. They think trauma always arrives wearing combat boots and carrying a flashlight into your sleeping hours.

But the mind adapts, or perhaps it mutates. Maybe, after enough years, the brain gets tired of screaming and starts wandering instead.

I remember once hearing that the nervous system never truly forgets vigilance. Even at rest, even after 40 years, it keeps one eye open like an old ranch dog sleeping beside a dying campfire.

Perhaps that is what those streets are, my mind still patrolling, still searching, expecting danger around the next corner despite finding only emptiness.

Before my alarm sounded, I finally gave up on sleep entirely. The headache had settled behind my eyes like the steady pressure of bad weather.

I got up, showered, and dressed, then sat in the kitchen drinking coffee while the house slowly brightened around me.

Everything was normal, as the refrigerator hummed, and the morning traffic started, yet part of me still felt stranded in those ruined streets, walking block after block beneath that lifeless gray sky.

The old version of PTSD came like an ambush. The new version arrives like fog, and I cannot yet decide which one is worse.