That Night

That Night

One of my first and oldest memories dates back to when I was a preteen. It gives me full-body shivers to think about even today, as an adult. 

It was a no moon night. As fate would have it, the entire town had a power outage. This particular night also happened to be the first time my parents let me live home alone while they were out for work.

I remember shivering intensely. Tears rolled down my cheeks when I couldn’t even get myself to muster enough courage to grab a jacket.

I had my head buried in my hands when my eyes caught the sight of something unfamiliar. At first, it was hard to know if it was just my sleep deprived self making up visions or something really was up. 

As I inched closer to the broken wall, I figured it wasn’t broken after all. 

It didn’t exist anymore!

Kid you not, by this time I had lost control over my limbs. They simply felt like a few lifeless grams of flesh.  And I had a fair reason to feel that way! It’s not everyday you see one of the walls of your house fallen. Without the slightest of sound. 

I don’t know till the date how but I let my curiosity have the best of me. I stepped outside the boundary of the non existent wall to find myself in a new room. 

My head was spinning by then. How could I have not known about the existence of another room in the house I’ve spent all my living years in? 

I was trying to regain my composure when I saw another unusual wall. Or, shall I say no-wall?

One of the walls of the room I had entered was broken. Without giving it a second thought I went forward to check out the other side. Before I knew it, I was inside another new room. 

Which had a broken wall too

Which gave way to another room too

Another room which had another broken wall…

And in no time I was lost in my own home. Except it didn’t quite feel like my own anymore. It felt like a never ending maze. When I figured I had come too far I had already lost my way. 

There was no point in trying to find a way out. All I could see were three walls, one broken wall leading to a new room and the new room having again three walls and- 

Yeah, I was terribly lost. I almost felt dizzy all of a sudden and fell to the floor. 

Next thing I knew, I was lying on my soft velvet bedsheets. I opened my eyes to see a perfect room, with no broken walls. With a skeptical eye I walked over to the living room to get an idea of just what had happened the previous night. 

To my surprise, everything seemed to be alright. My mom offered a cup of coffee and sat next to me. 

I had asked her how she returned early from her work trip. To which she stared at me blankly. 

"Which work trip?" Echoed my dad. 

I went straight to my room and opened my last diary entry. It was from the day my parents had supposedly left for the visit. As I touched the letters in my handwriting, I saw them turn faint and gradually vanish…

It felt like a sign. A signal. Like the universe was trying to tell me something. I focused my eyes once again on the last page and my eyes zeroed in on the first paragraph that remained. 

Rest was pretty obviously wiped away, just the way I was from the world. 

The other world, that is…

That same night, I once again had a nightmare of getting lost in my own house. Once again fainting to the floor and waking up on my bed. Everytime it felt even more real. 

That's my life. It has pretty much been that way ever since the night. 

Every new day starts with death. That's my life.