Kate Didd

Day:103

For every woman who counted the seconds between a door opening and knowing which version of him walked through it.

It’s the Fourth of July, 2026. I’m sitting at the edge of the lake.

The first booms go up as a test, they’re calibrating, making sure the timing is right before the real show starts. I can smell the sulfur already, drifting low over the water. Then the screeching starts, that long high whistle before a firework tears open the sky, and underneath it: laughter, kids running, someone crying, sparklers hissing in the dark. It all piles into one sound. One noise made of a hundred different noises, and I sit inside it, wondering.

I wonder if this is what the battlefield sounds like to the men who’ve actually been there. The booms, the screech, the smell that gets into your throat before your brain even knows what it’s smelling. I have a feeling it’s close. Close enough that my body doesn’t know the difference tonight.

I am a veteran. But I need to be honest about something, because the truth matters more to me than the tidy version of the story: I was already broken before I ever put on the uniform. My run was short. And what lives in me isn’t a war wound from a war zone.

It’s a war wound from men. Not one man. Not one moment. One after another after another after another, hands and voices that bruised something in me long before any enlistment paperwork existed. So when people hear “PTSD” and picture combat, I have to correct them, gently, in my own head if nowhere else. Mine comes from doors. From the sound a door makes right before it slams. From footsteps that might be nothing or might be the start of something. From a noise, any noise, that could, at any second, be the beginning of another lesson I never asked to learn.

If you know, you know. If you’ve ever laid still in a bed calculating whether breathing too loud would wake something up, you know. If you’ve ever gotten good, terrifyingly good, at reading a room in the half-second before you walked into it, because your life sometimes depended on knowing which version of him was home, you know. This isn’t a war story for people who’ve only seen war on a screen. This is for the women who survived a war that never got a name, never got a medal, never even got believed half the time. The ones who made it out. The ones who almost didn’t. The ones still counting the ways they almost didn’t.

Some of us weren’t just hurt. We were nearly erased. There’s a scale most people don’t know exists, not “did something bad happen” but “how close did it come to being the last thing that ever happened to you.” I’ve stood somewhere on that scale. So have so many women I will never meet, sitting at their own edges of their own lakes tonight, flinching at their own fireworks, saying nothing to anyone because who would understand that survival can look this quiet, this exhausted, this loud.

That’s what hypervigilance is, for me. Not a metaphor. A way of living where some part of me is always checking over my shoulder, always pricing out the exits, always half-listening for the sound that means get ready. I know, I know, intellectually, that it isn’t happening anymore. Nobody is coming through that door tonight. But knowing that and feeling that are two different countries, and on nights like this one, with the sky detonating and the sulfur thick in the air, I don’t always get to live in the one where I’m safe.

I see his face. All of his faces, every single one of them, stacked on top of each other like transparencies held up to the same light. The one who screamed until I wanted to bend just to make it stop. The one who wanted me broken instead of bent. Some of them tried to take me out of this world entirely. And I remember what that felt like, screaming into the void of my own life, fighting tooth and nerve just to stay in it, just to earn a place in a world I was told, over and over, I didn’t deserve to take up space in.

I fought my way into this world anyway. Not the world I was born into, the world I get to actually live in now, on my own terms, as someone who is allowed to exist without apologizing for it.

So when the fireworks go off tonight and my body drops into the old pattern, flinch, scan, brace, I try to remember this instead: not everyone was built to survive what I survived. Not everyone was handed that kind of forging. I was built like a warrior because I had to be. And a warrior doesn’t stop being a warrior just because the war changes shape, from a man’s fists to the Fourth of July sky lit up in celebration.

The noise will end. It always does. And I’ll still be here, at the edge of the lake, having outlasted every single thing that told me I wouldn’t.