I was tired, tired of all the bullshit in my life. I couldn’t take the stress, anxiety and endless sadness I felt. I just went straight to bed, fully dressed. I jumped up and plummeted onto my bed. As I layed there thinking of all the events that lead to where I am now and began to feel every emotion possible as I replayed my thoughts I felt myself drifting off to what I thought was sleep, but was further and further from reality. I opened my eyes seconds after realizing I wasn’t falling asleep I was doing something different. When I opened my eyes I looked around to see a plethora of colors that moves in a psychedelic haze. I saw blue swiftly fly past my face, I could smell yellow, touch white, and I was lifted by green. I became very confused because as swiftly as I was set into that psychedelic haze I was taken out and put into a dark, gloomy, and raining day. I am stuck in the rain with no umbrella only a trench coat over my suede boots, dress pants, and button up. I run for shelter towards a neon sign, open the door and I find myself in a diner but am struck with a case of deja vu. I have been here before, not in my life, but in this exact moment in time replaying an old memory. I look around and I hear the waitress and chief laughing in the kitchen, I see the old man looking at the newspaper flipping pages, and I can smell the fresh hot apple pie the waitress just put on the counter. I heard a faint whisper from behind as I am smelling the apple pie on the counter, “Nice to see you can make it Nico”. I turn around with nothing but a smile uttering to her “I wouldn’t miss it for the world, happy anniversary beautiful”. Then she embraced me with her warm gentle hug, grabbing my face with her long sleeved wool sweater over her hands and laid a kiss upon my lips. She grabbed my hand and lead me to our booth, where she already had her fresh brewed coffee. The waitress comes up to take my order and I asked for a hot chocolate and grilled cheese. As we are waiting for my order we begin to talk about everything and anything, we end up staying for an hour and a half just talking and laughing. All of a sudden I saw myself outside the window in the pouring rain, in ragged clothes with a sign that had, “wake up, this isn’t real” written on it. The moment I read it, the police came to arrest me, they began to brutally beat him and throw him into the backseat of the patrol car.
I look to the girl and ask, “Did you see that”?
She gives me a puzzled look and asks, “See what Nico?”
I rush out to speak to the cops and begin demanding answers such as, “why did you arrest me” and “where did I go”. The same moment I asked, everything changed. It stopped raining, outside was dry, the sun was in the sky, and the officers were on the hood of the car drinking coffee.
As I am waiting for my questions to be answered the officer says, “go back to your mem-”
The girl comes rushing behind me and says, “Nico what are you doing? Come back to me”.
After this whole time I still don’t know her name, but I know her. I am not lost for words, I’m just lost for her. I don’t know her name, but I know her, every little thing about her that makes her herself, and so special to me. This is so confusing to me I am searching for answers, but instead am drawn to a puddle and keep staring at it and I feel a gale forced wind. All the leaves begin falling off the trees and I am in awe, until I realize they are all moving around me, surrounding me, encasing me in a web of death and rebirth and in an instant I am in a completely different place, but I am still with her. We are in winter jackets, with matching back packs in the middle of an endless valley of wheat. We are holding hands, and then I hear something. I turn around and see dozens of people with weapons and even dogs chasing us. We begin to run, and we don’t stop running, we begin to descend down a hill and as we are running I see a opening in the hill that is covered by a log. I pass it slightly then push her in and go right after protecting her from any danger that could come upon us. Then my heart begins to race even harder as I hear all of the men and the dogs run past us and even over us. We wait there for several minutes, then I peak my head out and look around. When I turn back to tell her it is clear she is a completely different person, I know she is bad now, I am so confused. My only instinct is to run, run, run as far away from her as possible.
As I am down the hill I notice a meadow of weeping willows, the same flowers that symbolize a person’s sins after death. I begin to run through this meadow, as I run I feel heavier, and I continue to get heavier the further in I go, but I can’t go back to her because then my fate will be sealed. I continue to run, until I collapse. I begin to take my final breaths, but for some reason I begin to reach around me and check my pockets for anything. I shed a tear as I pull a zippo lighter out of my pocket. It’s my brothers old lighter, he gave it to me before he stopped talking to me and left my life for good. The lighter has always been drawn to me, I would always have my friends hide it around my apartment so I didn’t need to see it, but within hours of it being hidden it would be found. The lighter says, “In our time of need, may the light shine the way”. In that moment of me holding it, in my final seconds of life, I’m shedding a tear not because I am on my death bed, but because I forgive him. I am prepared to die and am waiting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I feel the engraved quote, and I flick the lighter and I give it it’s final light. Or so I thought, because in that very instance the meadow is burned, all of the willows are left in a dwindling ash and I am lifted of a heavy weight. She was approaching very closely until I look back and see the willows made a barrier, that she could not pass.
Once I noticed that, I began to run through the woods. I was running mindlessly until I began to see arrows on the trees, I started to follow the arrows path and when I reached the final tree it had a “x” on it. I began to look at it in confusion, looking around for a reason. In an instant I am grabbed from behind. A hand covers my mouth, and the other holds me by the neck and I am pulled back. I realize I am falling backwards I hear whispers of familiar voices that bring me to home, then everything is still. I get off the ground from being on my back. I realize I was pulled into the tree. In utter confusion I look around the room and behind me my eyes witness something unbelievably heart breaking. I see my grandfather, in the flesh, breathing and approaching me. I have not seen him in years, since he was in his casket. I cannot believe what is going on and begin to shed a tear.
He embraces me with a strong hug telling me, “My boy, I have missed you”.
As I embrace him back crying on his shoulder I respond, “I miss you to, everyday”.
He responds, “I know my boy, but you have to listen to me. None of this is real, you are trapped in your mind. You need to cont-”.
As I quickly respond in confusion, “What do you mean I am tr-”.
In frustration my grandfather responds, “I told you listen we don’t have a lot of time they are after you. You are being eaten away by your stress, anxiety and all the hard times you are suffering. Your mind is attempting to kill you off in order to free you of all the ‘weight on your shoulders’. You know when you have had a dream where you have been falling and wake up”?
“Yes I have…”, in a confused response to the question.
As he continues to explain with, “Well this is the stage after falling. You need to forgive in order to kill your mind. You need to forgive to move on in order to move out. You have seen what forgiving can do to save you, or what it can do in order to shield you from your mind. I love you, but this is as far as I can go to help you”. As he finished he disappears into the walls.
“Don’t leave me again, I miss you, come back!”, I scream this as I begin to sink into the floor.
As I am sinking I begin to sink faster and black out. I awake at the base of a tree with a wooden necklace around my neck. The necklace has, “you will always be my boy, you have my mark” written on the inside. As I read this I feel my birthmark, clench the necklace, get up and continue. I continue to run through the woods, as sun falls and the night begins to rise I try to find a shelter. Everywhere seems so obvious, because I am essentially hiding from myself. My mind would know exactly where I would hide because I have the same one. As I continue to move from place to place, I begin to get hungry. I see smoke rising in the distance. I begin to swiftly move through the woods as quietly as possible as I advance towards the location of the smoke. I get to the outer perimeter and realize that there is a trail to the left of me. I begin moving around the perimeter to my right. I am looking inside the circle I am creating taking note of the hooded adult and son, the pot of food over the fire, and the RV they reside in an go back and forth from. After two slow laps around the perimeter I decide it is safe to approach. I approach them from the path saying, “Excuse me”. I say it several times, each time getting louder until they finally realize I am there. The moment the son sees me he draws a rifle I failed to notice on my watch.
“I am not here to harm you in anyway, you can search me. I don’t even have a bag. I am just a hungry traveler, I have no need for your food but a plate of food will not be turned down. I am more so here in asking for a place to rest till morning”, I state in order to descalate the situation.
The son then goes on the state, “I don’t care about your intentions! I don’t know you! There is barely enough food for my moth-”
“Come here sit down and here is a bowl”, the cloaked mother cuts off her son and hands me a bowl of food.
“Thank you it means a lot”, I said this as I took a spoon full of the soup that I was given.
“You will also be safe from whoever you are running from” the mother says.
My first bite tasted weird and everything clicked. My brain knew I would go find shelter with other people. The food tasted weird, and neither of them had a bowl of the food while I was walking the perimeter. She also said I was running from someone, but I never told her this. As I figure this all out I throw the bowl at the son and get up to run. As I stand up and get to my feet I take several steps while looking back and fall to the ground, I am left paralyzed. As I am laying flat on the floor my vision gets blurry and I am on the verge of passing out. But seconds before I lose consciousness the “mother” takes off her hood and in the dim light of the fire I realize who it is, then black out.
I awake in a setting I am all too familiar with. I am in the room, the same room me and her shared our first night in. Her eldest brothers old room, the mini fridge is next to me on the bed, the outlet is across from me with my phone on top of the table next to it being charged. I am laying down in the bed and jump when I hear the door open and see her walking in with a omelette she made and a glass of orange juice. She hands it to me and I start eating. After that I am consumed by her beauty and personality as we start to have a conversation. One topic leads to another and we talk about everything under the stars as well as above. Then hours pass and I am pleased and I start to remember exactly what happens, the moment she put her head on my bare chest I mouth her sentence perfectly, like it were a song i had on repeat, “I love you Nico. Promise you will stay, I need you in my life more than ever”. Without hesitation I responded with “I love you too, I was never planning on leaving”. In a moments notice she got up and started screaming at me saying, “YOU’RE A LIAR NICO. YOU NEVER LOVED ME. HOW COULD YOU LEAVE ME SO EASILY”. As she was screaming this, it echoed in my head without stopping and only getting louder until my ears rang. As my ears began to ring I tried to cover my ears, close my eyes and clench my head. As it began to cease I realized it was because she had dropped to the ground because of the fact she had just slit her wrist. I jumped off the bed, grabbed my shirt and wrapped it around her wrist. I tried to put a lot of pressure on the wound in an attempt to stop the blood and help it clout up. She started screaming at me, saying phrases she knew I’d hate, “your friend was there for me more than you were”, “you put in no effort into this relationship”, and “I wish I never met you, you are the worst thing to ever have happened to me”. As I was on the point of breaking down, it occurred to me that I never woke up and this was another aspect of my life I have to forgive.
I begin to tell her, “I am so sorry Bella, I had no intention of hurting you in anyway. You were my first love, I won’t be able to have anything that innocent ever again. You helped mold me into who I am now and I am forever grateful for that. I still miss you everyday because I have yet to find anyone like you and it hurts me to know you are happy with another guy.”
“Nico I fucking hate the fact that I love you”, she screamed at me.
I began to cry and dive my head into her neck and then the paramedics barge in the room, they are pushing me aside and put her on the gurney and as they were about to push her out of the room and to the ambulance, I see who it is. It’s my mother, the same person who I hurt this night when I was not home in the morning. She is looking at me as I get on my knees.
“Mom I am so sorry about not being there in the morning when you woke up. We both know I do not care about my decision because it was beneficial to me. I do want to ask for your forgiveness. I am honestly sorry that I broke your heart that day, that you lost so much trust in me. I am sorry for all the hurt I put you through. I should never have done such a thing to you.”, I said to her as I got up and gave her a tight embrace.
“I love you so much Mom, I never want to hurt you again I can’t see you like that ever again”, I said as a tear fell from face and landed on Bella’s face.
The instant my tear fell on her face, my blood covered hands were lifted of her blood, my shirt was dry and clean of blood. I watched all the blood flow back into her veins and she arose. She jolted up and looked for me. The moment we locked eyes I gave her a hug, and kissed her on her cheek.
As we were making eye contact she requested, “Please Nico, just say it one last time”.
I knew exactly what she meant, so as I was balling up from the pain it took to say to her, “I love you Dumplin, sweet dreams, sleep tight.”
“Can you give me a goodnight kiss Nico?”, she asked me.
I knew it was gonna break me to go that far and kiss her. But I did it anyways because I always wished I would have savored my last kiss with her more. As I was going in for the kiss, I was pulled back, by a unknown force and was moving as if in hyperspace. I was screaming at the top of my lungs because of how I was cheated out of having a last kiss with her by my own mind. The fact I couldn’t allow myself to have a final kiss with the one person I miss having in my life more than anyone else. I then wake up in my bed, sweating, panting, with my heart racing. I run out of my room, down the stairs and barge into my parents room to see them laying down. I rush to my Mom, hug and kiss her and tell her how much I love her, then do the same to my dad. My life was finally back, I got out of my own mind. I went to school that day with nothing but positive vibes. The sky was shining, the birds were chirping and dogs were playing. I was uplifted in the fact that I had destroyed some of the most influential anxiety I had to deal with on a daily basis. I was well rested…
I contemplate finishing this story, I just would like to know people’s thoughts on it. If I get good criticism I will keep going, if I get good constructive feed back I I’ll tweak and continue going. If none of that, I’ll probably get back to it when I have time. Thank you for those that have read this far.
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