ETHEREAL STORIES

CRYSTAL CLEAR

Trees and vines are all around me, the sticky drops of water keep permeating my hair and I'm feeling like a week old cake, which was kept out in the open but under a dripping tap.

I wanted to get out, enough of the greenery, the damp, the mist, the worms, the bugs and most of all the blood sucking mosquitoes and suddenly, there is this rumbling sound that sounds exactly like a big hungry bear.

I definitely do not want to be mauled by a bear, I start tripping and stumbling my way through the thick insufferable forest, at the fastest pace that I can.

There is something wrong, I can feel it, right down in my bones I have this feeling that something worse was going to happen. That is when I realize that my path is clear and that I'm mostly tripping on my own feet and when I finally look up.

The entire forest is hanging upside down and a very sharp bark is falling right at me. I wake up with a gasp and wipe the sweat off my heavy lidded eyes, damn these dreams and damn this sleep that kept eluding me.

One fine bright sunny day, while we were moving to the city because of my dad's new job, there was a commotion on the highway, I don't remember much but I recall that there was a lot of blood and a small child's body who was in an accident along with her family.

Even after all these years, I still remember her tiny floral dress which was almost my size but her body was at an awkward angle and it looked painful. I remember her red boots and her discarded pink hat that was splattered with blood very clearly.

Now, even after two years I can still remember every detail, even though my dad tried to drive by fast to avoid my curious eyes, I did glimpse it in detail.

The doctor says that my sleep problems are due to the childhood trauma of looking at that accident, he says that only time can heal my mind in understanding that reality is harsh and that accidents happen.

I didn't understand then, I thought I had to take a pill named TIME and was happy that it would help me with my sleep.

Just a few days after I had seen the accident I began to lose sleep, the harsh reality had hit me harder than never before.

I just didn't want to sleep because of my recurring nightmares of me lying broken and bloodied on the street with tiny glass pieces all around me, next to a crumpled and crushed car.

I could also see my parents bloodied but bawling their eyes out beside my body and this is how I woke up scared and sweaty, undone from my own fragile mind. The doctor prescribed me some sleeping pills sometime last year and it turned out to be worse because I couldn't get up from my nightmare.

He said for a small girl of 14 too many pills were bad and that I had to try therapy, so I started my therapy and now I just die in vivid environments and confusing settings in my mind, but the bottom line being 'my death is inevitable'.

My therapist Ms Geet is a very kind woman, she brings chocolates to our sessions and tells me to treat them like pills and every time I take one of the chocolates into my parched mouth she tell me to close my eyes and recreate the horrid scene of the accident and change it.

At first I was startled and I sat up immediately and said "What ?! Change it?! How can I do that?!" she chuckled with a small warm smile gracing her lips.

She had a gentle voice, "Sweetheart, isn't all this happening in your head? Don't you feel you can change it if you could control it? Or in the least avoid it?" that was the day I thought about all this very hard and that night I went to an exhaustive sleep.

When I was greeted with the start of the nightmare of us driving I willed it to be just me in the car and my parents didn't end up in that nightmare. So that is how it all started and almost immediately went to hell.