I Let The Wolves In

They had been there for years, scratching beneath the floorboards, breathing through the cracks in the walls, circling the house at night with yellow eyes and patient teeth.

At first I fought them. I wedged chairs beneath the door, slept with every light burning, pressed shaking hands against the locks and told myself I was stronger than whatever waited outside.

But wolves are patient things. They do not need to break the door down. They only wait for the nights when your hands are too tired to hold the lock shut anymore.

They waited through the panic, through the sleepless hours, through the days where I carried my own body like something already half dead.

They learned the sound of my footsteps, learned which boards in the hallway creaked, learned how long I could go without hearing another human voice before the silence itself became a wound.

At first they stayed outside. I could hear them pacing on the porch, their claws tapping softly against the wood, their breathing heavy beneath the windows. Some nights they whined like lost things. Other nights they sounded hungry.

I tried everything to keep them out. Music loud enough to drown them. Television until morning. Crowded rooms. Long drives. Conversations that meant nothing. Work until exhaustion. Anything to avoid sitting alone in the same room as myself.

But every road led home eventually. Every distraction wore thin. Every laugh faded too quickly. And there they were again, waiting outside the door like they knew they would outlive my resistance.

And one night, after too many battles with nothing, after too many mornings of pretending I was still alive in all the ways that mattered, I stopped fighting.

I opened the door just to see what would happen.

They entered quietly. No growling. No violence. Just slow paws across the floorboards, slow breathing in the dark, as if they had always belonged there.

One laid beside my bed and whispered every fear I had ever buried. One sat on my chest until breathing became work. One followed me room to room, making sure I never forgot how little of myself was left.

Another slept beside the front door, guarding the exits. Another stood in the bathroom mirror, wearing my face but speaking in a voice that hated everything about me.

Soon they were everywhere. In the mirror. In the silence between phone calls. In the long pause before answering, “I'm okay.”

They slept in my ribs. They drank from my thoughts. They fed on every good memory until even joy began to feel like something that had happened to someone else.

The house changed after that. The walls seemed smaller. The windows stopped letting in light. Dust gathered in corners I no longer had the strength to clean. The air itself felt heavier, thick with old fear and the smell of something rotting where no one could find it.

Friends stopped coming by. Or maybe I stopped answering. It is hard to remember which came first. All I know is the rooms grew quieter, and the wolves grew bolder.

They climbed onto the furniture. They slept in the hallway. They scratched their names into the walls. Failure. Regret. Shame. Loneliness. Fear.

Each wolf had a different hunger. One wanted sleep. One wanted hope. One wanted every plan I had for the future. The oldest one wanted memories. It fed on birthdays, old laughter, the sound of people I loved, until I could barely recall what happiness used to sound like.

There were nights I could feel them breathing around me in the dark, their bodies shifting across the floor, their eyes glowing in the corners of the room. And I would lie there awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering if this was all I would ever be now: a man keeping company with wolves.

Sometimes I thought about opening the door again, about forcing them back outside. But I had lived with them so long that the silence beyond them felt almost more frightening.

Because at some point the wolves stopped feeling like intruders. They became routine. They became familiar. They became part of the house.

Part of me.

And the worst part was not that they came inside.

The worst part was how quickly the house grew quiet once I stopped fighting them.