From 2004 and on I began having dreams of a little black-haired girl. These dreams would go from fighting monsters (and losing) to sitting on a park bench, and this small girl would come and lay her head on my shoulder. Increasingly, she would snuggle into my neck and mutter something, with a softly understated emotion. For whatever reason these dreams bothered me. Try as I might, I couldn’t understand. But she kept coming back. I would wake up more disturbed each time. For whatever reason, her just sitting there really disturbed me. The monster dreams were terrifying! Don't get me wrong! Those were some of the most visceral dreams I have ever experienced. I would wake up screaming in agony. But just sitting on a park bench with a little girl, who kept whispering indecipherable things into my neck, really bothered me. And these just kept going. For years. Hell, sometimes they happen even now.
After a particularly rough year in 2009, I dropped out of college and began repairing my life. I began dating my childhood sweetheart, who I would eventually marry. I reconnected with my parents. I made something more of myself. On a random trip to go pick up my sister from her college, Benedictine in Atchison, KS, I experienced such a profound peace that I knew I had to go there. No, it made absolutely no sense. But I felt that I needed to go here.
So I did.
Maria joined me a little while later.
For the first year it was fine... and then I moved off-campus, and it got bad. There had always been a vague unease I had, being in town, but I was a college student who didn't have a car, o I normally didn't really pay it much mind. Well, now I was living off-campus. And that vague unease turned to a constant anxiety that literally went away if I left the damn town. It was eerie. It made no damn sense.
I didn't "dream" in the way that I used to... assuming I slept. The low-scale spiritual equivalent of "fingernails on a chalkboard" exhausted and overwhelmed me so that I couldn't relax enough to sleep. It was then that I started doing research... to find that I was in the most haunted town in Kansas, home of "Scratching Sallie". And, when I did sleep, usually after hours of lying in my bed unable to relax, I would wake up to find the black-haired girl sitting at the head of my bed, right next to me. Sometimes she was looking at the floor. Or my prayer corner.
Or, you know, at me.
Kinda like this.
You do one thing when you wake up at 4 am (or so) and find a stranger next to you, no matter how normal they look, or not. I screamed. Every time. So would she. And then she’d vanish. Right before my eyes. Of course I didn’t sleep the rest of the night... and already wasn't sleeping. I began dreading sleep, which meant I slept even less, which meant I needed more sleep. Over time a profound dread of going to bed worked its way into me. The "fingernails on a chalkboard" feel in my soul got louder and louder and louder. It was almost audible, at times. And it never. Ever. Stopped. While I was in Atchison.
I tried to figure out what was going on, to no avail. There wasn’t a history of my apartment being haunted. Scratching Sallie was said to be aggressive, and I had had these dreams before going to Atchison, so I began to wonder if I was being followed around by a demon. So I went to an exorcist, he was puzzled. I had no “red flags”. There was nothing to banish! No spirits of any kind were attached, nevermind afflicting me. Psych evals, which the exorcist insisted I take, came back clean, too. The psychologist said that if I was delusional, none of these events, whatever they were, would be bothering me. I was in great distress, because I had knew it wasn't normal. Whatever this was, it was something else.
I became moodier and moodier, and more and more reclusive. Thinking hurt. Breathing hurt. But something in me kept saying, over and over again, that I was meant to be here. And it had never been wrong before. Ever. This one little voice had kept me going through the worst times before, and I had no business not trusting it.
It all came to a head one hot summer night. The screeching in my soul had reached a newly fevered pitch. I slipped out the door and meandered, searching for something. Anything.
And then I found it.
The river.
Dark and swift and silent, it ran before me, with riptides that made it impossible to swim in. I considered this last fact far longer than I should have, staring into the wet darkness.
I couldn’t take it anymore! Why was I suffering so? And why why why was every last bit of intuition telling me to stay in this hell??? I stood, there, just looking at the water. Thinking.
After a few moments, the river’s swiftness brought silence. Not quiet. Silence. And its darkness gave me something far more valuable than light. For a few moments I could see it all. All of it. Heaven, Hell, mortals, all the worlds. There was such a beauty, it was so incredible.
And, somehow, I was just like it. I reflected back onto the universe. The microcosm and macrocosm were inseparable. In that second. That split second! I knew this was going somewhere. Because the universe was okay and was able to get past whatever was going on, I would be okay. I have no idea why I believed it so much, because it doesn’t make a lick of sense. What does the world actually have to do with me? But I really did believe it. And in retrospect, I was correct for doing so. So I plodded home, limbs suddenly leaden. I collapsed into my bed. Without any fear. I just lay down and slept.
I awoke in a cold sweat. My skin had been peeling under the heat of some fire in the dream.
And there she was.
But this time
I didn’t scream. I started, sure, but I didn’t scream. I’d never really looked at her. In that small eternity, I finally did.
She trembled.
What spirit trembled, like a little girl? Seriously? A surge of guilt tentatively went through me. I had been so afraid of her, so disoriented, so perplexed, that I had never, not even once, considered what screaming might do to her, if she had been a little girl. I watched as this little girl steeled herself in an act of courage I know I couldn’t have done at her age. And we both got a true look at each other.
This is closer to what she actually she looked like.
She sat in pastel pajamas, with some cutesy floral pattern. Her face was sensitive, alive, whole. Her skin was healthy. Her hands had the proper digits. Yes, I counted. Like I said, I really tried to look. And then the tragic truth broke through, really and actually broke through, softly. Certain.
This was no ghost or spirit.
Just a little girl.
She wasn't tormenting me. She wasn't evil. She was just as lost as I was, and I hadn’t considered that she wasn’t a demon or Scratching Sally or Lilith or whatever other horror I imagined that whole time. It simply never occurred to me she was just… a person.
For one moment, one uncanny eternity, our eyes locked. She didn’t scream, nor did she flinch. She stared into me. I wish I could tell you what I saw, when I looked into her eyes.
But her soul was more than the river’s. And that had shown me everything… or so I thought. I had been wrong. I can't use words to adequately express what I saw.
I don’t remember falling asleep.
But when I opened my eyes, I was alone.
And I missed Maria the way you miss your lungs.
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