Nightmares and the Ocean

The waves of the ocean crash onto the shoreline, retreating into the water after a few moments. Rippling and bubbling as it washed the sand with every repeating wave, almost ensuring that it never dried, ensuring that it stayed moist and calm, settled in position. Ensuring that not for a single moment did it let the sand crack, periodically stealing bits and pieces of it as it retreated, hiding the grains deep inside the ocean. For when the people who arrived every day mercilessly tread over and contaminated the shoreline, there would still be parts of it living inside her, thriving and laughing in her memory.

Occasionally, the waves would leave gifts for the shoreline, arrays of the most vibrant seashells, pebbles smooth and rough, erasing the footprints of the creatures putting the sand down with each step. It’s a tranquilliser— calming the agonised sands as its fears escape its interior like the mottled-green mud-crabs.

The sand, too, expresses its gratitude for the sea— leaving little pearls of himself carefully crafted by the sand bubblers to be carried away by the gentle backwash. But that’s about it; the sand doesn’t have as many presents to gift to the ocean as he aspires.

***

IAN:

My eyes snap open as I watch my hand shaking uncontrollably in the dark. Sweat beads trickling down my forehead, I felt like someone had dumped a bucket of cold water on my head. I tried to remember why this was happening— why I didn’t seem to have an ounce of control over my body, and why my memory had abandoned me on the darkest of nights. I could remember absolutely nothing about that nightmare, yet I found my eyes darting around the walls of the room, scared that whatever horror was haunting me had followed me into reality. My heart was pounding so hard and so loud, it felt as though it could explode out of my chest. I sat up, uneasy and unsure, imagining the monster under my bed like a little child. I took a small peek and half-expected a skeletal hand to poke out from the darkness, grab my ankle and pull me into the shadows.

This did not look like a skeletal hand.

I felt two strong arms wrap around me with a firm grip, and I unknowingly leaned into the warm touch.

My hands decided to do otherwise.

It’s hard when your heart and brain move at different paces, you know. You’re thinking something and doing something else, and honestly, you don’t realise it in the spur of the moment, but it’s annoying. Annoying when the one thing you’re supposed to have control on snips the strings connecting the puppeteer to the puppets. I felt my hand collide with something soft, and a soft scream of pain rung in my ears as I opened my eyes, the impact flinging her to the other bed as her back crashed into the metal frame.

My eyes were now wider than when I was looking for the monster.

“Kaia?” My voice was barely a whisper, more air than sound. A sigh of relief or a soft gasp— I couldn’t choose which it sounded like more. I watched her silhouette edge closer. Her hand moved towards me.

“Don’t.” I pulled away. “Don’t touch me.”

She said nothing for a few seconds, and I couldn’t decide whether the silence was comfortable or not. I guess it was, judging by how I released a breath I didn’t realise I was holding when she spoke again. “Are you okay?”

“Are you?”

“No,” she stated, plain and blunt. “Not since you punched me in the gut and I almost died.”

I rolled my eyes. “It didn’t come close to killing you. The impact wasn’t that severe.”

“The impact of the punch? Of course not. The impact of seeing your face white as a sheet? Something in me died.”

“Perhaps sanity,” I whispered.

“Look who’s talking.”

It stayed like that for a while, and I gradually fell asleep, bored and unknowing of what to say, or how to carry the awkward, sarcasm-filled conversation. I watched my sister. Kaia was back on her bed (the one on whose frame she had hurt her back).

She didn’t say anything, but I could feel her eyes on me. My eyes drooped and I hoped I could sleep this time at least.

My hopes were short-lived. That's the least I can say.

My body lurched forward within moments of rest, my mind swimming with disturbing thoughts. My eyesight was hazy, but I could make out the figure of my sister walking closer to me once more. You a masochist? I felt nauseous, as though the contents of my stomach were going to trampoline out of my mouth. I felt something cold and wet press my forehead— a towel, maybe. My eyesight was now bearable, and I could see two emerald orbs floating in front of me. The edges of my mouth curved up a little, remembering that that was what I used to call Kaia’s eyes before mom died. I felt the towel lifted off my face, balled and dropped into my lap, my forehead throbbing as though it was missing a piece. My heart pounded on my ribcage, like a prisoner who thought his sentence was unfair. It was beating with such speed and intensity, I wouldn’t be surprised if it burst out of my chest, fell onto the floor and flopped around like a fish taken out of water. Breathe, I hear a voice say. Calm down. Take long, deep breaths, and you’ll be okay. I tried, I really did. But my breath hitched in the rush to calm down and all I could muster were choked gasps. Sharp intakes of air filled my lungs, a piercing sensation suffocating my stream of thought and body.

That's the most I can say.

“I—” I heard my voice croak out. “I just—”

“Shh," Kaia whispered. "It’s okay, you don’t need to say anything. I’m going to touch you on your hand, okay?"

No! Don't touch me!

"—Nod if you can feel it—”

“No!” I howled and backed away, startled and flinching at my voice. “Just… don’t touch.”

She shot me a look. “Why not?”

I shook my head, unable to explain it. “Just don’t.”

Kaia rolled her eyes. “Your lack of sleep and convincing skills disturb me.”

“Was that meant to be sarcastic?”

“No, and yes.”

My head was imitating The Leaning Tower of Pisa.

I stared into her eyes, and the surprisingly concern-filled ones she wore stared back. She pulled me up onto my feet.

“You’re supposed to be consoling me when this happens, you know, being older. Older by six whole years. It’s almost unfortunate.” Her words made no impact, losing the I-meant-that-to-sound-snarky tone when she pulled me into an awkward hug, rubbing her palm on my back in circles. The gesture was… soothing, and calming, even.

Calmness; It was something I hadn’t expected to feel since the nightmares. I re-centred on my actions, worried that she was hugging me.

My hands had stopped vibrating. For her sake, I was glad I was too sleep-deprived to focus. These nightmares got so confusing and felt so real, that sometimes I found it hard to believe that it was just a fragment of my thoughts— my imagination, a part of my fears I revisit every night to experience.

A part of me I wouldn’t hesitate to kill.

I pulled myself out of the embrace, finding myself eye-to-eye with this short therapist, who was annoyingly my little sister. Her green eyes bore into mine, piercing through me, looking like she could catch glimpses of my soul. Like she had some sort of eerie Halloween-worthy connection with spirits and souls. It was funny— I wasn’t afraid of the paranormal, but I was terrified of revisiting sour, gloomy memories. What a kid.

The day mom died in that crash… The images of the accident flashed through my mind every night— the root cause of these damned nightmares. It was as though someone was shining a 100,000-lumen flashlight into my eyes and brain, carding their fingers through it and filing through different memories. Then they’d stumble on some memory I’d thrown carelessly into the dark side of my brain, tossing it into the light and playing it on repeat like a tape in my thoughts.

Every night, what I see is a gross exaggeration of what happened, an addition of my unsettlingly dark imagination blended with my thoughts.

Not a kid.

Mom screaming for me to take Kaia and escape before she drove off the cliff and into the ravine with an out-of-control car, was the scene that played in my mind on repeat. But for me, the ghosts that lurked around in my brain played cruel jokes with that single memory, adjusting the lighting— flashes, sudden blotches of darkness, scenes and voices blurring and blending into the surroundings, voices— trailing off mom’s words like it as a warning that there was some murderer behind us, and finally, taking the steering wheel on my imagination— projecting eerie images of white eyes glowing in the dark, a knife appearing out of thin air.

I've probably watched too many horror movies. Yeah, that should explain it.

That, my friends, is a legitimate example of twisting the facts. I stopped referring to Kaia’s irises as green orbs after the incident— or accident, more suitably. Kaia was a spitting image of my mother, the same green eyes, the same complexion, the same smile. Se looked like a child-version of my mother, and it hurt for me to even look at her, for every time I did, I imagined that she’d leave me and go, too, one day, her eyes concerned more for me than herself when her ties to life were severed— just like mom did. It irritated me as to how she could do it. How she always behaved as though she’d be ready to save everyone’s smile, everyone’s life, even if it cost her her own. Why she never considered herself as a part of that ‘everyone.’ —It still boggled me, how a ten-year-old could live normally after she had lost her mother. How she was able to move on, just like mom would want us to, and it peeved me as to why I couldn’t. Why I wasn’t able to do things I wished to, and how she was able to fulfil both my wishes and her own. Why? Why she could, and I couldn’t. Why I needed someone to keep me sane and stable, and why it should’ve been a ten-year-old girl taking care of me, who should be more damaged than I am at this point.

I stared into her eyes (Once more! What can I say, I like seeing the concern in this monster's cold eyes). Her little ten-year-old hands grasped my wrists with a grip that was neither too tight nor too soft. It was firm enough to provide me with a sense of safety, a feeling that everything was going to be okay. Everything was going to be alright.

I’ve been told that many times by many people— by optimists who were always looking for the light even in the darkest of situations, by people who showed their sympathy to me, even by people who were afraid of me. Everyone. It’ll be alright, they said, but the impact of the words never felt so hard and true as when a person who I know is going through the same thing believes it too. A person who’s been hurt more than me was still looking on the bright side. So when I was not, it felt almost unfair. But when Kaia believes it— Kaia, who’s been through everything I have, the same experiences, the same unsettling, painful truths, she believed that there would come a day when the sun would shine on us. She believes it, so so will I. At least, I’ll give it a chance. If she's doing it, it's probably worth it.

Her emotions, expressions, faith, her heart and soul poured onto me like the crashing waves of the ocean, giving me a new light, a new belief to put my faith in. It kept the hot glue sticking the pieces of my heart together wet and sticky, not allowing it to dry and let the pieces of my cracked heart fall and break, destroying the bit of hope I had inside. She was a living Pandora’s box, filled with all sorts of emotions— hatred, grief, pain, sadness… But like a good girl and my mother, she only let hope reflect out to the world. The kind of hope which could keep several lives from shattering once glanced upon.

A wise horse once said— "Everyone is a bit scared, but we are less scared together." (Quoting Charlie Mackesy in his artwork)

Those viridescent eyes still shone so brightly, hoping to one day be complemented by the tan of her skin, after the light glowed on it.

I stared.

That’s when I realised her power. The power to keep negativity away. The power of the ocean's waves to be able to cleanse the sand, while still losing some of its water in the process. The power of the ocean to stand so intimidatingly, but the same ocean that said that sand lived inside of her— and without the sand, the marvels in her stories would never be alive.

The grass was truly greener on the other side, gleaming in her eyes.

And I found that if I stared long enough, I’d soon find its reflection in mine.