Another nightmare I cannot escape from

I wake up again in a nightmare. This time I am neither in Hell nor in Purgatory. I'm in another universe, in a house. I decide to go out and see what's out there. By the time I got out, the leaves were burning. Everything was covered in ash, smoke and threatening flames approaching our city with colossal rapidity. Fire, a lot of fire. Fire everywhere.

Without realizing it, I wake up in the house again. I pull the shutter and a cold late autumn breeze bounces back and forth, running through my lungs and ending in severe pain in my skull. I was completely stunned. My legs crawled to the next room, and I was greeted by a dark, miserable atmosphere. The worms lurked among the unwashed dishes in the sink, on the floor was a black and shiny kitchen beetle, the walls were torn in deformed lines, and only a ray of sunshine ran through a corner of the kitchen.

A ticking of a clock on the wall woke me from the hypnosis induced by the disgusting sight. I swallowed hard, but I immediately steeled my eyes, my eyes fixed on the tongue that showed seven o'clock. I stumbled to a door, opened it, and turned my attention to the thick clouds above the sun-drenched mountain.

In a few moments, small drops of water fell more and more quickly on the ground, wetting my tired face and ragged clothes. Water ... My eyes fixed on the mountain surrounded its rough shapes. My mother-in-law was squealing and the next moment, my thoughts went to the meals I refused when I was just a tank. Hot vegetable soup, with pork or beef and lots of parsley, juicy pilaf with vegetables, chicken ostropel with mashed potatoes, my mother's chocolate cake ... I refused them all without thinking twice. Instead, I loved a hot polenta with melted butter, fatter cream, and fresh cow's cheese. In the days when my father cooked, he prepared this food together with some livers soaked in a pan in wine.

Where is it? Where did you hide, little one ?! Kaba ?!

How unusual to call Kaba like that.

The images that soothed my hungry stomach disappeared once the rain woke me up. I was soaking wet and my flesh was shivering from the cold. I had glanced over my shoulder at the dilapidated house I had left and found that I had to return, because otherwise I would not have died of starvation, but of cold.

Cold. It is cold. It's not hot. There is no fire. There are no flames everywhere.

I didn't dislike wilderness. When I lived in the noisy city, people didn't bother me at all, and I completely stated that I couldn't live in a quiet place. But things have changed, and the need teaches you to cope in any situation. For a long time, I prayed earnestly to God to help me get out of that impasse, but He never thought of answering me, and the impasse slowly became my new life. Wandering from house to house, I tried to go unnoticed, clinging to life as long as I could.

I had entered the house and taken a chair from the kitchen, which I had broken to pieces with a brick. There was a stove in the room where I had slept the night before, but there was no wood. I had barely found two or three in a more demolished closet. I had taken the legs of the chair and thrown them into the fire that was slowly going out last night, and the creations rose quickly when I had made them a little windy with a moth-eaten cloth.

I was lying by the stove and sighing for a long time. What I would not have given then for someone to come and cut my side, I had thought in the gloomy silence. I didn't even bother to look for thicker clothes or at least a lost cape somewhere. I forced myself to get up, but my steps led me to a mirror by the closet. I had wiped the dust with my hand and looked at the image in the mirror. Pale face with apathetic eyes, purple circles, chapped and bleeding lips, sore cheeks. I had become really costly.

I returned to the floor, no longer caring about my physical appearance and closed my eyes trying to fall asleep for at least a moment...

The flames burn everything in their path, destroying entire lives in which people have struggled with all sorts of problems. I'm nailed in one place. I can't move, my muscles are stiff and all I can do is see people burning alive and exasperating cries for help. A spark flies to my coat, followed by dozens more, making my clothes only rags and leaving marks on my skin. A giant flame seems to come to life. I can see a certain devilish smile and naked eyes. An arm of fire catches me and knocks me to the ground, covering me with fire. I try to scream, but the smoke stifles my lungs. I can't scream, I can't run. I'm hot, I'm melting. I am dying.

"That night had been the worst night of my life. But I'm also grateful," I say, for the little sparks that burst from the fire. I sip a mouthful of mint tea and look around, where I meet several sympathetic glances. "I wanted to die. I was tormented by nightmares about the fire that made me leave town," I continued.

Without realizing it, I wake up at a campfire, saying what I just went through, without realizing what's going on.

"Cookies?" someone hands me a handmade cardboard box full of homemade cookies.

They're warm. Steam is lost in the dark and in the stars. Refusal. My eyes fall in silence to the infinity of stars in the sky. I would love to be a star. They are never alone and I could admire in a star life, the great moon.

"How did you die?" I break the silence, pointing to the person holding the box of biscuits.

"MeI? I didn't even realize I was dead. I loved very much, I loved so much that I was killed. I had seen a bright white light that pierced my vision violently. I blinked often, and when I finally got used to the dazzling glow, I saw a chubby woman dressed in light clothes. Her shoulders were hunched over, and there were wrinkles on her skin. Small, pale brown eyes could be seen between the creases of her disheveled face. It was mom. Remember, Mom?"

An old woman looks at the fire in silence, nodding very suggestively. You could barely see her face moving. It looks exactly as the guy with the cookies describes it.

-"You were small, skinny and with a neutral, lost expression. You were older, more withered. The last time I saw you was two years ago, in a black coffin and in new holiday clothes. I had asked you for signs, mother... But then, you were in front of me, you saw me - or I thought you saw me, and I still wondered if I wasn't dreaming. Know that the light around her seemed like a holy aura and, as if torn from heaven, brought before me for an unknown reason. I must have been dreaming, I was telling myself.

But my mother was there with me. I remember now, and here, how I sat in her arms at night, curled up, surrounded by her body. I remembered walking together on the black slag streets at the foot of the mountain, waiting for my father to descend a slope, or trying to tame my cat so that it wouldn't stop me or waiting for me at the pharmacy and dying for it. .

I wanted to get up and hold her hand, but a force stronger than me held me in place. I was looking at my mother's face, but all I could see was a careless mask looking through me.

'Mother! Mother!' I shouted at her louder and louder.

Not a muscle of hers seemed to move at my pleas and cries. In a position of complete stillness, the mother moved farther and farther away. The woman I was desperately calling back then, and exactly two years ago, was a real stranger. She wasn't my mother, she was a woman who looked like her, but she didn't talk, she didn't see me, she didn't move. He disappeared in the same gleam in which he had appeared."

"However, not much has changed, mother?" he asks ironically.

"The light was slowly fading, and the place was turning into a forest with many tall trees. Suddenly I came to a wild forest of a sea of ​​bright light. I was supposed to be dreaming, but it was so real... My eyes were falling sprinting from one tree to another, and my gaze stopped on a sign on a hollow trunk. I got up without any problems and immediately felt the lack of paralyzing force that stopped me from hugging my mother. My fingers slid over the crusty surface, mimicking the shape of the blood-colored mark. It was a circle with a perfectly straight line down it.

I had glanced over the path next to the important tree and walked for a while after it. The grave silence in the forest disturbed me. Most of the time, the forest was filled with the sound of birds, wild animals and their cries, but then he heard nothing. There were no broken branches, no springs of water or leaves moved by the wind. Quiet and that's it. Only the setting sun witnessed me.

I was getting out of the way when I saw a blackberry bush. When my mother and father took me on hikes with them, they explained to me what blackberries look like and how tasty they are. I had never tasted it until I was seven, and to my shame, I didn't even know what it looked like. I grabbed a few blackberries and tossed them up, then caught them directly in my mouth. The thin skin was cracking in my teeth, and my mouth was full of a sweet-sour taste.

I was immediately startled to hear a branch cracking under someone's footsteps. I hurriedly hid behind the blackberry bush, a paralyzing panic gripping my entire body. A tall, thin boy is running, holding the hand of a frighteningly beautiful girl. That boy was me, and I was looking at myself from a bush. I was remembering! Everything seemed like a long-lost memory, but I could feel its recent warmth, somehow it had happened recently.

'What if we ran together?' asked the boy who looked a lot like me.

'You are absurd!' she replied, irritated.

Of course it was absurd. It was aberrant and irrational, and I honestly can't understand how I could ever have such a crazy idea.

'It was just a hypothetical question,' he was in a hurry to add, I mean.

There was a sublime silence between the two. I can't remember the girl's name even now, but I remember her face perfectly, with big eyes and lips, fine white skin and pink cheeks. She sat down on a piece of dry earth, clutching her yellow dress under her thighs. His thin hands fell lazily on the grass and were lost in the thick green threads. He - I mean - looked at her with a radiant expression and sat down next to her.

The girl had received a flower from him and inhaled the scent. The sun had set for a long time, and the night animals could be heard from the forest. Several footsteps could be heard in the distance, and the two hurried to their feet.

'Do you think they're hunters?'

'Why would he hunt in the evening? It's dark!' he completed.

Only the full moon shone on the strange shapes of the forest. The shadows of the trees, the thick fog and the owls gave a really scary air. What was I doing there, actually? I wondered to myself. The two started along the path and seemed to get lost more and more in the dark. I had also gotten up from the bush and started after them. I hadn't had much time to walk, because a boy passed by me - damn well known to me - with a quiver of arrows and a bow, without noticing me.

I continued to be puzzled by the three of them. The archer stopped abruptly, leaned against a tree, and looked at the two of them, while I had not been seen, even though I was right in front of him. The boy and the beautiful girl stopped in a corner of the cliffs, sheltered by a clump of bushes, where they hurriedly glanced over their shoulders, making sure they were okay and no one had followed them.

It is said that people feel their death when it surrounds them and hunts them. I don't think I felt it. And I'm sure of it, because I watched as an arrow flew straight into my skull as I looked at the bustling city, and I didn't realize I perished in a quick death.

The last time I walked the narrow streets of the beautifully lit city on a cool spring evening. I could see everyone, but they didn't see me. We passed the baker - a family friend who had helped us many times after my mother's death - and he smelled of fresh bread. I could only imagine for the last time what his breads looked like: leavened and compact."

"I didn't realize I was dead either," I admit after the boy with the biscuits finishes his story. I also had a very confusing period in which I did not understand why no one saw me. But then I got here. He found me a kind of angel on a rock, looking at the sea.

"I was looking at the sea too," he says in astonishment.

A strange feeling grips me. I feel my soul hot, and my mind seems to be on the verge of finding out a truth unknown to anyone. My gaze immediately falls on the boy's mother and I see her smile and a tear dripping from her wet eye.

"The sea is the most beautiful thing you can see after you die. We all find ourselves when we see the waves hitting life to the fullest, and we are no longer there to feel that cold, frothy water. Know that death has always been in people's lives, not at the opposite pole as the poor souls in our old house believe. And angels find you when you sit facing the sea, ocean or lake."

The woman speaks concisely and clearly, and under our curious eyes, she metamorphoses into a slender, young and lively woman. The boy next to me smiles warmly, reading in his eyes the desire to see his young mother again. All that longing that can be read all over your face.

The voices inside my being stop. I am happy, finally, after a long time in which I listened to cries for help and saw people burned alive. They stopped.

As the stars are reflected in the water, as the waves hit the shores, as the water is always in motion, so is our life. Our life is water, and death is the reflection of the dark water of the night and the light of the moon.

I finally really died.

I can't get the idea at the end that I'm waking up somewhere else realizing I didn't die. In Nagamine's room where he commits suicide, being forced to see this scene again. I want to wake up.

I start screaming and slowly I feel my sleep break from the world of dreams and I wake up in the dark, back in the cell. I have a strange feeling that this was not just a dream.