Drowning Dreams
My sister had nightmares about drowning. We would hear her thrashing
about and moaning pitifully from our own rooms in the bleakest and darkest
middle of nights. We were all sleep deprived. Being a family of three; my
father, sister, and I, we considered ourselves close. But I think that we were
farther apart than we realized. My sister never even told us the most important
part of her nightmares. We had no idea until we read her diary afterwards. When
she woke up, she was soaked in cold water. It wasn’t simply sweat; it was lake
water, as though she had actually been swimming during the night. For the
dreams we took her to a bunch of different people, thinking they could help,
but they were to no avail. She still had those nightmares; we still woke up in
the night. We eventually got so tired we had arguments. Oh, we had arguments.
They were fierce and screamed for hours. They were horrible beasts that raged on and on,
chained to the floor, yet snarling and baring their teeth at one another face
to face. We would have to hold our ears
while we screamed for fear of losing our hearing. Perhaps the anger was reason
enough for her not to tell us about being soaked to the bone. I would certainly
understand that.
She told me about
them once; the dreams. It was a solitary evening where we sat around the table
half-heartedly doing homework while rain pattered like a soft drum-beat
outside. Our town is very wet and cold, and can be depressing sometimes. I don’t
know what came over my sister, but she suddenly started talking about them.
Before then we had already debated about them for a long time, but she had
always told us the exact facts of what she had seen, never more. This time she
told me more in depth about what she felt. I remember it quite clearly. I
always remember rain.
She had felt it when she was so small she could barely remember. We often
went to the lake down a little ways from the town, and one time she was simply
swirling her fingers in the water as usual, when she felt it enter her body. It
was warm and light, so it delighted her, and she didn’t think anymore of it. We
had learned that same day that a lady in her middle years had committed suicide
by jumping off the highway bridge across the dam; tying her feet and hands
together. She hadn’t put two and two together until she started having the
dreams years later. She said they were the most painful experiences she had
ever had. Whenever she entered the mind-stopping freezing water, her chest felt
so heavy as if it was bleeding with heart-break. They were not her own
feelings, but the memories of someone else. She couldn’t breathe either. She
always woke up gasping for breath. That was one of her fears, she said; of
drowning in her sleep, and dying in real life.
When my sister died, I remembered that evening conversation. No matter
how hard we ran to find her, she had jumped and sunk herself down into the abyss
of water. I had barely found her, when I saw her jump. I ran and jumped into
the water after her, but I couldn’t find her. I couldn’t believe it, I simply
couldn’t believe it. How could my sister, so joyful and happy before her
nightmares, jump and kill herself? Did the nightmares have anything to do with
it? Was it how she said? Did someone else’s soul drag her? As soon as I thought
that, I felt something warm enter my freezing body. It started at my feet as
though I was grabbed by an invisible hand, and spread upwards through-out my
entire body. I felt paralyzed with relaxation. And from a voice in my head, I
slightly heard someone whisper in my sister’s voice, “I don’t want to die.”
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