One Harsh Summer Morning

It’s around 7am and the summer heat is rising in my belly, making me uneasy in bed. It is as if something is boiling inside me and my breath is about to exude this vapor. The summer sun is already greeting from the high east sky beckoning to the sweltering noon. It feels as if nature is already murmuring the anticipation of what a wrathful heat it is going to endure. Sometimes even the light can become a darkness, imagine looking at the extreme light, it can actually blind us, and this is what the trees high in the sloped mountains must be feeling. As the sun kept rising and claiming its victory over all the fragility of earth, I was finding myself in a decision dilemma.

Shall I wake up or sleep some more? The problem with this dilemma is that I want both, on one hand, I would like to wake up and start my day, on the other, I would like to gently curl and close my eyes, like a baby sapling does after enduring a day.  

I am sleeping on my right side and my right shoulder is slightly aching bearing the weight of my left part of the body and suddenly I start feeling a rhythmic animalistic thrust force towards my buttocks from back. It feels like a constant thud that a rock feels when a gurgling stream hurls through the slope and falls upon it. 

I am scared to open my eyes! I extend my hands to check for my mother, but she is not there. Is she lost like the midnight wind that hustles the serenely sleeping trees in the moor and leaves behind only a mere test of its force, or gone somewhere off leaving me alone in this bare room, which is now filled with the stale breath of this fearsome figure lurking behind me. My hand just searches for something or someone in the air and as if in loss shakes involuntarily, my heart convulse. 

It’s like you were on a ferry under infinitely stretched sky comfortably looking at the waving sea, and in a glimpse, the distance between the sky and the sea has shrunk so much that all there is a darkness, and if you would to stretch your hand a little, you could maybe even catch this darkness. It felt like this stark darkness would slowly swallow me, and it was already pulling the strand of my hair.

Then who is this person? At my back pushing and trying so hard as if to enter a cave which has hidden many secrets for him! 

I am seventeen, old enough to understand what he is trying to do! But I am too scared to scream as I know that no one will believe me! So I lift my leg and strongly hurl at him, making an agitated-arghh noise, trying to ascertain that it is disturbing my sleep. My mind is full of evening fog now, mixed with darkness and whatever little light that a fading day has to offer, whatever that will come out of it will be like a gust traveling uncontrollably through the valley in no particular direction.

It stops, the physical to and fro! 

Scared, I don’t even turn to face the reality of what just happened. I don’t want to even face the one who did this to me, because I know., because no good will come out of discretizing it, and then you know it somewhere deep down in the dark pit of your memories, you try to pull out the ladder and try to close the opening of the well for centuries to come. You leave everything for the stale rain to wash away. My mind somehow recalls this, some things are better left unknown!

I am frozen like a small poppy in a cold midnight. And slowly the heavy doses of medications draw the sleep curtain over my fatigued eyes. 

In my oblivious sleep, I dream of beautiful forests and fairies, a magical white light covering me from all sides, as if keeping me safe and protected from the austerities of the wild world outside. I see the wolves are gone, the howl of hyenas have converted to a sweet song of morning birds, the trees have bathed themselves with the dew drop, the white clouds have shifted themselves to the north horizon.

I open my eyes and it’s 11 am. I look around and no one’s in the room! I am thinking of the morning episode, which seems too unreal right now. Was it a dream? 

Was it true? How could it be? How could he do it? Did he actually do it? Or was it just one of my psychotic hallucinations? I try to slowly lift the lid of the dark well, and try to peek into the cold aperiodic sound coming out of it, but that lid is heavy and I’m frail. I give up at some point. 

Life will never be the same again for me, and I will never know if that really happened at 7am on that harsh restless summer morning!

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P.S. – My very dear friend, Vaghawan from Nepal, has helped me decorate the story and edit it. Thanks Vaghawan, it would have not been possible without you 💕