nosleep

A possibility exists that there are people who had similar experiences to mine as to where they don’t know what is wrong with them. No matter how hard they try, they can’t quite put their finger on the missing piece. Cannot find the antidote. The gears that make us human are broken for the most part. They don’t move in the right direction, or some are missing, thus rendering the whole mechanism faulty.

I sometimes find a safe haven in my loneliness, but other times this room I live in feels like hell. I think hell is two places: the first is what you feel deep inside, and the other is a physical place. The sadness comes in waves and crashes against the shores of my fragile heart, breaking it ever so slowly every day. It’s all a whirlpool of sorrow, sadness and the fear for what horrors tomorrow might bring.

And living like this isn't easy, but I somehow manage to push through. The physical pain is excruciating, and the darkness in my mind is like a demon always trying to take control. It claws at the most sensitive areas of the mind, trying to rip out and kill whatever it can.

It all started when I was just a child. With that man. That man and his awful grin.

At first, I thought he was just a recurring nightmare. Then he manifested himself through sounds in the middle of the night. Sometimes a glass would shatter in the kitchen, or the door to my room would slowly creak open only to reveal nothing in the darkness. Other times, the room temperature would suddenly drop, making me shiver even on hot summer nights.

He changed how he wanted to be heard or seen as time passed. When I was a kid, I think I was maybe seven or eight years old, the man would make me wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of children giggling and whispering. He made me think rats scurried inside the walls. One time, the light in the room turned on by itself, and the lightbulb suddenly overheated and exploded in a matter of seconds.

The manifestation of the man had always been there with me through various stages of my life and in different forms. He would come unannounced, as he did when my grandfather died at 88 years of age. That day, the overcast sky complemented the sorrow we breathed in the air. The sadness embraced us all with its bitter and cold arms and sank its teeth into our tired flesh, delivering us into nothingness. Everyone who attended had their heads hung low. Some cried, and some stood there watching the coffin or the ground witness the end of life. The end of a cycle.

Except for one man. He was fleeting, like a speck of dust in the wind. He was there for just one moment. A wrinkle in time. I saw his wide grin from the corner of my eye. He watched from behind a tree but not hiding. He made sure everyone knew he was there. I think I was the only one who saw him. Fully dressed in black, a shadow, a ghost made of smoke. And as he stood there rubbing his hands with satisfaction, almost as if he was the only happy one at the funeral, I saw his grin and shiny chromium teeth. He glanced at me for a mere second and then disappeared, leaving me unable to move. He had planted the seed of terror in my mind, let it grow, and vanished into the unknown.

And after that, I hadn’t seen him for years. I forgot about him. I would remember, of course, the things that happened in my childhood, the unexplained phenomena, the trauma and him standing behind that tree at my grandpa’s funeral. But, I didn’t know if these happenings were real anymore, nightmares or just a figment of my imagination.

Occasionally, I would still jolt awake in the middle of the night. Muscles jerking and gasping for air. Sweat beads rolled down my temples, and for a few seconds, I would lay in bed scared and lost. It would end fast, and then I’d go to sleep again and forget about it the next day.