Chapter 43: Chapter 43

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

- Iris Murdoch

13 November, 3:25 am

I entered the room and the first thing I saw was red. Red on the carpet, floor, red on the bedsheet and red on the lifeless body lying on the bed. My legs couldn’t hold me up any longer and I collapsed. There on the bed was my friend, my sister, my only spark of hope in this dark world, Liza.

This must be a dream…no, this can’t be real.

Her wide eyes that stared at the ceiling held sadness, the same familiar look I always saw in my reflection but never  so still. Her lips were parted like she was trying to tell me something so desperately but her lifeless heavy body wasn’t responding to her pleas to move.

Was she calling for me from the other side?

Wake up, wake up. This is just a nightmare. It has to be.

Somehow I crawled towards her to her hand through the blinding dizziness that suddenly spun my head and threatened to knock me out of my senses. I wish I did lose my consciousness but the need to wake her up from this endless sleep was more urgent and yet it was too late. She was gone without a goodbye.

Her figure blurred several times as I stared at her, unblinking, and wiped my tears again and again. She would wake up right? Any moment now and I couldn’t miss it.

I wanted to shout, to scream, to ask her who did this to her but nothing came out of my mouth. My body went numb and there was only the endless stream of tears rolling down my cheeks. So many things that I should be doing and yet I sat there, staring at her like a puzzle, a riddle, that I had to decipher and failed to do so.

Wake up. Please wake up. I am begging you.

My head started hurting and I felt nauseous. I was afraid to blink my eyes even though I wanted to do that at the same time, endlessly, praying that this only a mirage, a hallucination.

My mind screamed at me, shouting different commands, to call the police or hospital or anyone for help but my body was not responding as if it was in coma or libido. I felt like I was having sleep paralysis and this was the demon that stared at me from the dark shadows inside the dark room.

Funny, how I was waiting for her to wake up and tell me that it was prank and that she tried to fool me. She would burst into a fit of laughter and I would punch her arm and hug her at the same time and shout at her so that she never did anything like that again.

But her eyes, it was so different, I couldn’t recognize them without the sparkle that was lost now.

What happened? Where was I?

“Liza? Lizzie…? Wake up. Please, wake up. It’s Thursday. It’s movie night. We are supposed to watch a movie today remember? You can’t miss movie nights, you made sure I never did. Come on, wake up. Okay, I promise to let you chose your favourite movie, yeah? So get up now.” Not the slightest budge of a nerve. No sign of life.

“Hey you remember the guy you wanted me to hook up with? Well I think I will give him a chance after all, but only for you. So hurry up now, wake up or I’ll eat all the popcorn and you won’t have any left. I can more though so don’t worry about it.” I didn’t know if she heard me. I wondered if I was talking at all or was it in my head? The only think that I heard was silence.

It took me a while but my body finally started to reacting to the way it should. Everything was a blur though as I somehow fumbled around until the phone magically appeared in my hand and suddenly the next thing I know, there was a person talking to me on the other side of the line.

“Hello, emergency hotline. How can I help you?”

“Please, come- Liza- I. Need you… Please- just come- help… me- Liza…”

“Don’t worry ma’am, we are on our way. Just stay where you are and-“ The rest was unheard as the phone dropped from my incredibly heavy hand, everything was. I let go of myself and curled up on the floor, unable to keep myself upright and stared at her face. The small red freckles that made her look so pretty, where did they go?

“Liza, I know that perhaps this is all too sudden for you and that this might not be easy. I tried many times you know but every time I backed out. Not because I didn’t trust you but because I wasn’t prepared to face my past again. I didn’t want to live through those moments again and sharing those things would make those old wounds alive again. Sorry, that I was not strong.” She could hear me right?

“Remember the first day we met? You made a joke but I knew you were serious when you asked me what’s behind those eyes. And I just smiled at you. Trust me, I wanted to tell you everything, each and every incident about my past but you read my silence better than anyone and the hug you gave me that day made me feel so peaceful and calm. I smiled genuinely for the first time, I think. It was so alien to me that it scared me because I was afraid of losing it. There were so many times when I was almost at the edge of telling you what happened to me, the words were at the edge of my lips but the shine in your eyes and that heart clenching smile always stopped me. I didn’t want this precious…thing, to be ruined by what has been already said and done. I felt that I should not steal your happiness by telling you about my gruesome past. I didn’t want to see sympathy in your eyes. You possibly won’t judge me or define me by my past like others would but I know that deep inside something would change your perception about me? I don’t know… Maybe I was just overthinking.”

I sniffled a little and cleared my throat trying very hard to stop myself from getting a panic attack by letting the reality of the situation settle in. If I pretended that everything was alright then maybe everything would actually be alright.

“From the moment I was born, I always felt like an outsider to my family. Like I’m different from them, like I don’t belong with them but they were my parents, biological parents. They still are but they are not my family and they ensured that I knew it. Anyways, do you remember when I used to always react whenever you said you wanted to be a boy? Because they don’t have to face so many hurdles like us females. Their life is so much easier and whatnot. You said I was such a huge feminist and perhaps you weren’t wrong. The thing is…my parents never wanted a girl. They wanted another boy. I was a disappointment from the moment I was born. That is the reason why I always got angry at you whenever you pointed out the negatives of being a female. In a way that reminded me of my parents and somewhere I felt hurt when you used to say those things”

My throat felt dry and all my words were jumbled up. I closed my eyes and clutched my phone to my chest as if it was the only thing left for me to hold on to in this big wide world. As if I would fall into the darkness below and the phone was the edge of the cliff that I held onto.

“My father was abusive, he used to beat me up and my mother never said anything or rather couldn’t because she herself got the same treatment at times. Eventually she started hating me too. I don’t blame her for that. They made it hard to be normal, empathic, have a clean conscience. My brother was an exact mirror of my father. In both action and behaviour. He was older than me and had more value to my father for several reasons. That left me with no one else to confide in.” I paused a little and swallowed the heavy pit in my throat before continuing again.

“I had no one except my pillow to cry on. I went through my panic attacks while clutching the pillow to my chest, trying to calm myself. They did let me go to school but they didn’t let me have any friends. Not that I wanted to either. No one would have understood and being invisible was easier than anything else. I was always tired and keeping up with other people was not something I could do.” I sucked in a long haggard breath trying to form thoughts into words. The past was too deep and if I went deeper then it would suck me in whole. So I tried to graze the prickly surface as carefully as I could.

“It’s funny you know… It’s funny how it all feels like Déjà vu”

I gave out nervous laugh and tried to sit up to see her reaction, forgetting that the irreversible has already happened. There were only those lifeless sad eyes and pale skin and waves of blonde hair caked with blood, a body left behind of the life full of hope that used to be.

“It feels like everything is happening all over again. The hole in my chest that started healing when I was living with you, opened up again and this time the pain just feels so much worse. I don’t know what to do because I don’t feel anything.” The things that I felt didn’t make any reason anymore. I didn’t even know what they were anymore. Just too much and enough to make me ultimately numb to it all.

I laid down beside her and stared up at the ceiling. It looked so nice, a familiar feeling of the numerous nights we spent together chatting and talking about so many random things until we got tired and fell asleep. There were still a long list of things I wanted to say but I felt so tired and weak.

My eyes dropped as I fell into the deep abyss of oblivion with only one name on my lips… “Lizzie?”

****

“Lizzie?”

I opened my eyes slowly, and blinked a couple of times to find myself back under the ceiling. The same ceiling with small dents and freckles that can be only noticed when the lights hit them a certain way, creating shadows, each one so different from one another with intricate details that I knew very well after spending so many uncountable nights underneath them. Liza’s room was not the most minimalist or even clean for that matter but it had her personality. It was special in its own way just like her.

The tears came slowly and dripped down my unmoving face as I laid still and paralyzed by the flashes of images in my head. Her limp hair, her cold and pale skin, her inert eyes, all lifeless and discarded. A shell left behind of what used to be. Painful reminder.

Paralyzed, I couldn’t move at all. It was hard to even breathe under this heaviness that laid on top of me and me so weak and vulnerable. Yet the tears, unaffected by the immensity, dripped down in streams until I could see anything else underneath the blurry saltiness.

“Rose? Rose, what happened? Are you okay?!” The voice I heard must have been nothing but a hallucination. I misheard what I did because it simply was not the reality of the situation, it couldn’t be.

But how to explain the illusion of Liza staring down at me with life in her worried eyes and her lovely face, framed by her blonde hair that was tied up into a bun. Was I having an episode of sleep paralysis? Was this a trick of my mind that showed me Liza instead of the dark shadows that I usually saw during similar episodes? It would have made sense because she was all I could think of and perhaps subconsciously this was a trick of my mind to soothe my frantic nerves so that I don’t go completely insane.

The theory would have made perfect sense and I would have accepted that as an answer but when the sudden touch of a hand shook me, I woke up from the delusion.

I took the deepest breathe that I could possibly take. As if I was drowning before and finally came up to take air. The release was too immense and welcome as I coughed a couple of times through the drought dry throat. Liza instantly understood the situation and handed me the bottle of water from the night stand.

“You okay now? Do you need anything?” A frown set on her forehead and concern laced in her voice, she looked at me worriedly. “You look pale, Rose. Did you have another sleep paralysis episode?” She knew all, too well.

“I-I think so. Don’t worry. Everything is fine now.”

It was not real, just a dream. It didn’t happen. I won’t let it become reality.