The Endless Story | Chapter 3 "The first dream"

 

It is my fate to answer phones bearing tragic news. My father is gone, and I am alone in the house to manage yet another loss. My aunt died in her sleep, sedated by an overdose of medication beyond what she normally took. Had she hidden pills somewhere, had she found them? No one knows. The point is that her heart stopped beating at dawn on Sunday, one day after the last time I saw her and we embraced for the final time.

I sit at my desk with my palm pressed against my forehead. I want to cry but I cannot. I must not cry. Perhaps I should be glad. Perhaps it was a release for my aunt, perhaps not. Perhaps that choice seemed right to her in that moment, to empty her body of every trace of existence and leave us with our memories, good and bad.

Hours pass, and noon finds me curled in fetal position in bed, clutching my pillows. I have not moved all morning, half-asleep and half-awake. At moments I feel my mind growing numb, as if it wants to sedate me from this grim reality. As if I hear the front door opening and closing, and my father's drunken voice calling me to the kitchen.

I rise somehow and make my way toward the source of the commotion. I was right: my father has been drinking and waits for me to prepare him something to eat. He does not seem to notice the tragic figure of his daughter, disheveled, with large eyes red from pressure and crying.

"Father... Aunt Miriam... she killed herself..." The words I just spoke struck deep into my heart like an axe buried inside me.

My father did not seem to comprehend the situation. As if he smiled somehow, as if he rejoiced at this outcome.

"Your mother always said it. Miriam would not come to a good end..." he answered, then belched loudly and freely. That was his only reaction to this tragic news. Then, as if yawning, he left to lie down in his bed. Even his lunch had fallen to secondary importance.

I follow his example and make my way to my bedroom and my bed. I take care to close all the shutters and burrow under my covers. The heat wraps around me like a veil, and my heavy eyes close so I may lose myself in yet another dream.

"The dark forest was illuminated only by the full moon traveling across the sky. A female figure rested against the roots of a tree, her emerald-green eyes fixed upon a leather-bound notebook in which her hands wrote furiously upon its pages. At intervals she looked left and right, as if sensing someone or something watching her. She continued writing until the moon began to disappear behind the clouds. She closes her notebook, stands upright, shakes the dirt from her clothes, and looks back one last time.

"Forgive me, Miriam..." she murmurs, tears in her eyes. "I didn't want this to be my first weaving..." she continues, somehow apologetically, to the creatures surrounding her in that dark hour.

The forest roars with the wind passing through it at that moment, as if answering this young girl. Nearby, an orange cat walks past, passing a female figure who watches the entire scene in silence and stillness."

Lumi jolts upright from her sleep and the vivid dream she had at that hour. She recognized the young girl in her dream. It was her mother as a teenager, perhaps, while the leather notebook resembled the one her aunt had given her.

She rises quickly and grabs her bag to confirm her theory. The leather notebook was there, quiet, waiting for her hands to seize and open it. It was somehow warm in Lumi's hands, the warmth of the midsummer sun as if it had been left in the sunlight for quite some time.

Lumi somewhat hesitantly opens its first empty pages and examines it carefully for any kind of writing inside. But nothing. It was empty, as it was yesterday. Disappointed, she leaves it on her nightstand.

"At the lantern of night, all shall be revealed," Miriam had murmured yesterday in her final words. Lumi looks at the time on her wall clock. It was 8 p.m., and tonight there was a full moon.

"If what I imagine is true, then it means I'm going mad too..." she said to herself, and let her tears run freely down her cheeks once more.