The Void Between Mirage And Reality

“Hellooo!” trailed a hesitant voice tapping ever so lightly at my right shoulder.

I turned around taken aback by the sudden voice, as I softly stepped out of my own train of thoughts.

I was looking straight at a small timid face of a young girl with dark lightly arched eyebrows widely spaced on a radiating broad forehead. Her lips were plump and a deep vibrant tone of peach red as if she had swallowed the sun and the contours reminded me of early morning petals of a blooming rose. Her perfectly pointed nose nestled snugly between her high cheekbones, with the tip sneaking slightly into the air as if curious to know all that’s going around. A course-textured, deep red shawl was tightly wrapped around her head framing her oval, cherub-like face.

Her big, dark, watery eyes stared right back at me as she hesitantly questioned, “Can I talk to you for a moment please?”

It was not a clichéd manner in which she asked so. Her voice had a certain gripping ring to it, like the distant soothing yet observant ring of church bells echoing in a valley.

I nodded.

“I want you to always remember a few things. Things about me. I am a girl who doesn’t like people screaming or shouting in anger, even if it is not at me and I just happen to stand in the room. It scares me. A lot. I don’t like people being angry at me. Not even in the slightest of manners. It upsets me, though I do try not showing that on my face.” She continued in a solemn voice like that of a child trying to convince some elder of the existence of nymphs, fairies and mermaids.

She kept talking and I seemed to have gotten myself to be in a trance-like state. I stared at her as she stood with me in the cold, cobbled street with a street light in the background making her presence seem dramatically overwhelming and silhouetting her petite, fragile figure.

And suddenly it all started melting in light. As if I stood in a hot room set up with rubber props that had suddenly started melting and the colours melted down into one another. The street seemed to be crying.

Crying, melting and disappearing into nothingness and giving way to a blank, numbing light. The light didn’t hurt my eyes, as a matter of fact it was quiet soft yet it engulfed me and and the silence it carried along with it seemed like a murder of crows angrily screeching and screaming at me and trying to pull at my hair and skin.

I shut my eyes close firmly as I felt it all subduing.

I slowly fumbled my eyes open to find myself surrounded by sooty darkness. Not the kind of dark where one can make out shapes of things around. Darkness that swallowed you up steadily, like some fear that gnaws on your insides.