The Nightmare

I haven’t had a nightmare in a long time.

I thought I was making progress, getting out of the house a little more, getting to know people, to trust them. This dream though, it seems like it has taken me back 1,000 steps in the process, like all that I was doing to get myself back on the right track and away from those suicidal thoughts has just been shot to hell.

I was back at school and winter break had just ended which meant new classes and I was on my way to my second hour which was way out in one of these little trailers we have (we call them portables). I was walking to the portable and I had to go up a ramp and there was mud all by the entrance to the ramp but I just stepped right over it, and right over a little girl who was lying there, eyes wide open. I was walking up the ramp when I quickly turned around and peered over the edge, calling out to her.

“What are you doing just lying there?”

“Can’t you see I’m in my grave?”

I winced to myself, “I’m sorry I bothered you, I’ve got to get to class”.

The girl got up, not even an ounce of mud on her pretty green dress. She was maybe ten years old, younger probably with a plaid green dress on and little black shoes, her straight blonde hair pulled back and covered with a purple bandana, lips and cheeks the rosiest red.

She looked like a doll I might have sitting on my shelf in my room as a child, but I couldn’t quite recall.

“Wait Violet”.

I paused, my hand on the door about to walk right into the classroom and forget all about the dead girl who knew my name.

“Why didn’t you tell someone what happened to you when you were a kid? Why did you let him get away so he could go rape other little girls, kill some of us even”.

“There’s more then just you?” I couldn’t look at her, my eyes were filling up with tears.

“Lots more, Violet. Don’t you think it would have been the right thing to do so he couldn’t do it to anyone else, you were hurt so bad, didn’t you think about others or were you that selfish?”

“Stop it!! What would you know about any of this? You didn’t live through it.”

She looked taken aback and I immediately felt like a horrible person for having said that, i was being selfish now and I had been selfish back then, thinking only of my own family and how safe I was them to be. Now I caused other families more pain and suffering then he had ever caused mine. Because of me other girls didn’t just feel like they had lost everything, they actually did. Maybe that was my problem, maybe I didn’t really lose it at all, I had just let him take it.

“My name is Emily”.

“Emily what?” I began to walk down the ramp, back towards her.

She shrugged, “It doesn’t really matter now, I’m not alive anymore so it doesn’t matter who I was”.

“Yes it does, to me”.

“I think you’re late for class”.

“I don’t care, talk to me, Emily”, I was begging her to keep talking for some reason, probably the guilt I felt that I had been part of the cause of her death.

“It’s too late to talk Violet, for both of us”.

That’s when I woke up.