(hi thanks for readin', vote if u do so wish to thank youu; tomatoes are a fruit, scientifically speaking)
somniphobia (n.)
som‧ni‧phob‧ia
The fear of falling asleep and staying asleep.
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My mother was the first person who taught me about nightmares.
It'd been several months after my halmoni had died, and I woke up to screaming.
I was young so I panicked. Screaming could mean a lot of things when you're older, but when you're younger, it usually either meant hunger, danger, or you didn't get a toy. And at three in the morning with half my brain awake, it didn't take much to dwindle it down.
I had raced to my mother and father's bedroom, only to burst in on my mom crumbled on the floor, black hair stuck to her forehead with sweat, face sickly with eyes better fit on a ghost than a person. My father had been crouched next to her, hands frantic.
"What's wrong?" he cried. "What happened?"
My mother just mumbled, hands sinking into her thighs as she tried to steady her breathing, tried to speak only to choke. She gagged. She clutched at her sleep shirt. Her body shook and pulsed with heat, sick with fever rotting from the inside out.
"I can't," she gasped finally, after my father had nearly begged her. "I can't."
I never moved towards her, too stunned and too scared. Even years later, I never found out what she meant.
I had clutched at the doorway for what felt like hours before my parents noticed me. By then, my knuckles were sore to the bone and my own skin clung to my shirt with dampness, with the faint remnants of the same, sickening fever.
My father rushed at me, trying to push me out of the room as my mother remained gasping on the floor.
"Seohyun," he said, because he called me that back then. "Why are you awake?"
"Umma..." I trailed off. Or maybe that was my entire explanation.
What's wrong with Umma?
His dark eyes were frantic, were regretful and panicked and darting and desperate. Like I had walked in on a murder with his hands stained red.
"You need to go back to bed," he said. "Go back to bed. Jigeum. Ga."
"Is...is Umma okay—"
"Umma is fine," he said. "She was just startled. Go back to bed."
"Appa—"
"Go back to bed now, Seohyun."
I went without a word.
It was one of the only two nightmares I'd ever seen my mother wake from. The others were left to my imagination with the audio of muffled wailing and my father's pleas to help mold them. My father never spoke of them to me, and if I asked, he brushed it off with a half-hearted excuse and a sharp turn of conversation I couldn't track back from.
My father never spoke of a lot of things, in hindsight.
Hindsight
It's always hindsight.
I wonder if that's what haunted my mother, what spiked that fever in her body that now haunts my own head. Maybe I caught it that night, seeing her crumpled on the hardwood and choking on air she couldn't grasp. Or what haunted my father, low-grade and insidious, unnoticeable until it ate away nearly every part of him with nothing but 'hindsight' to kill the rest.
YOU ARE READING
Suicide Buddies
Teen Fiction"My mother once told me there are three, and only three, truly defining moments in your life. One: When you don't know. Two: When you realize you don't know. Three: When you know. This is about the third one." --- Angel Young is going to die. Or at...
