Chapter 13: The Mistake
Emily was not doing too good. She was having nightmares, that was nothing new. But what was new, was that the bad dreams were more intense now.
It was no longer just barely there impressions of things that she barely remembered, when she woke up. Now the nightmares had a sense of clarity about them that had never been there before.
Drowning, suffocation, strangulation.
That was the theme that they had taken and they were sticking with it. Each night she woke up in a pool of her own sweat, feeling like she could not breathe no matter how hard she tried. And instead of easing up, the nightmares were picking up pace. Her crafts drawer was steadily filling up. Proof of all of the hours she spent awake, a needle and thread in her grasp. Her hands moving steadily as she tried to chase away the phantoms of her sleep.
She had even gotten to the point where she was hiding her crafts away in her handbag and dropping them off in random donation baskets throughout the city. The locked drawer she kept them in now overflowing.
Her mother was giving her more and more worried looks when she thought Emily was not looking.
Emily knew her mother, soon, she would go from just looking, to asking outright. And Emily did not like her chances of keeping her secret if her mother decided to come at her with the full might of maternal worry.
She had to do something, but just the thought of going back on sleeping pills had her breaking out in cold sweat. Sure, the pills knocked her out. Her body going into an all dark place. But that was the thing. On the pills, she slept, and once she slept, she could not wake up, they kept her under. Nightmare after nightmare she suffered through, but the pills would not release their hold on her. And on the nights where she did not dream at all, she woke up feeling like the world had been robbed of all its colour.
There was no joy, no rage. Just nothing in her.