There were a million voices in my head. Dark wicked things that haunted me. It was like living through a vortex of screams ripping me from my sense of security.
In the darkness, hundreds of hands reached up from the earth and grabbed me leaving behind thousands of bloody fingerprints. Those hands pulled me to the earth, and then through the earth.
Their voices cried for help, begged to be saved. I could not save them. I could not save myself from them. I could only listen to their pleas while I drowned in the wake of their limbs.
Before my last breath, as hands covered my face, I woke up screaming.
Once more, everyone in the room hated me. The young kids started crying, and the older ones scolded me.
Upon hearing my scream, Mother Olma rushed into the room with a definitive look of fear on her wrinkled face. Her hands clenched white on the cloth of her vestments. While the nuns soothed the children back to sleep, I was sentenced to Mother Olma's office, again.
"If you would just," I refused to let Mother Olma repeat the same lecture I received every time.
"I can't." I hollered, "They hate me. Everyone here hates me. I wake them up. I eat alone every day. I am at the receiving end of every insult. They hate me."
Mother Olma sighed. The effects of incomplete rest playing on her expression.
She continued, "You do not have to continue suffering like this. There are people here who want to help you."
My rebellious seventeen-year-old self retorted, "No one can give me my life back, so no one here can help me!"
"You're holding onto things that you can never have, Mei, and that is why you will always suffer," Mother Olma reminded me in a stern voice. Her face devoid of compassion stared upon mine with a level of gravity beyond her usual scolding expression.
A single tear fell from my left eye and down my cheek stinging ever millimeter of the way until it arrived at my chin. Whereupon the tear fell on my borrowed pajamas from some older boy who left this church for another.
My glance seared rage and frustration into Mother Olma's mind, but her tolerance formed from the last half-decade did not falter.
Mother Olma gave me an ultimatum:
"You can either carry this suffering by yourself for the rest of your life feeling nothing but envy and hatred, or you can give it to Him to carry for you so that you may walk a path of liberation and redemption. These are your only options, Mei. Pick wisely."
Needless to say, I picked Him.
YOU ARE READING
Memories of Mei
FantasyMei Marivaldi recounts the events of her life growing up in the era of the Second Lands. Many of these events remain a secret from her current traveling companions, and she planned to take them to the grave. Can Mei learn to let go of the past? The...
