My Dearest Friend; My Hallucination

My body is collapsing. Folding in on itself. Every morning when I wake, and every night when I attempt to sleep, I’m met with a resistance. As though my brain refuses to rest, and my body agrees. 

I spoke with my psychiatrist over the phone, she says I’m manic and prescribes another dose. But with every new med she gives, she also places in my head a fear that I will never get to live normally. Bipolar, anxiety, MDD, PTSD, insomnia, the works. I’m only compelled to live because the chemicals in my pharmaceutical candies are supposed to balance out the parts of my brain that don’t function properly. 

My mom keeps telling me to pray, keeps ensuring that god has great things in store for me, that my meds will only work when paired with hopeless words shouted at an invisible man in the sky who supposedly hears everything. But if he heard everything, would he not have also heard my cries and screams of pain that echoed as my eyes refused to shut at 3 in the morning? Wouldn’t he have heard the desperate pleas of a 10 year old as she sits on her knees begging for a new family? And when my meds start working again, just as my psychiatrist said, she’ll say I should give glory to god for answered prayers, but what a mighty coincidence it is that he suddenly decided to put in the work right as my meds did. 

It's been about a month now since I last slept through the night. A month since I last closed my eyes and didn’t dream, didn’t think, rested and rebooted the next morning. I’ve become a shell of a human being, a walking corpse if you will. The worst part is, nobody has noticed. It took a few too many dark jokes for my roommate to even ask if I was okay. No one else sees me enough to acknowledge the growing depth of the darkness under my eyes, or the way I constantly look high because they’re bloodshot and dim. 

So even as I’m writing this, at 3am of course, I can’t help but wonder how long it takes for a lack of sleep to kill somebody. Some studies say 3 days is when you start to lose it; I think I can testify to that fact. I started having hallucinations about a week in. I named her Greta, she's like my anti-sleep paralysis demon. When I lie awake at night she comes to visit, and sometimes she makes an appearance during the daytime, but mostly it's too loud for her to think straight. 

She's really a great friend once you get to know her. She graduated from a small community college in 1943 with a degree in education of course. What else would a woman have been allowed to learn? She had a husband, until she killed him because he was abusive, and then she slowly started to fall in love with her best friend. It didn’t work out, I think it was the whole 1900’s-falling-in-love-with-a-woman thing, and eventually she died alone and heartbroken from a disease her doctors never noticed. Her life is so much sadder than mine.

When she first showed up I thought I must have died already. A week into my lack of sleep and one night she popped her head over the end of my bed and waved. Initially, I screamed and threw a pillow at her, which I promptly apologized for, and then she started showing up every night. Some nights she tells me stories of her life and what the world was like when she was alive. Other nights I tell her what it was like to be raised in a wannabe cult with an abusive father for a pastor. And then on days when the night sky is particularly dim, we bond over our mutual hatred for the way the world is. We try not to get too political, but it's hard when politicians force feed you lies and then turn around and say it's humanity not politics. Liars, the lot of them.

Tonight our topic consists of dreams, literal or not. Greta was just telling me about what she had dreamt her life to be after the death of her abuser.

“I never thought I would be rid of him. It was like he was haunting me, camping out in our home as a lost spirit not quite ready to let go. Every time I stood in the kitchen it was like I could feel his eyes boring into my back and hear him yelling obscenities at me. I truly believe that house was haunted.” 

“Which is valid, of course. No one wants to live in a home with a vengeful spirit.” I concur.

“Right?” She exclaims as though I’m the first to ever agree with her. “That was when I asked Eloise if I could move in.” Eloise was her best friend. “She agreed and a few days later all of my belongings were packed into 2 small boxes and loaded into her husband's car.” 

“You only had 2 boxes of things to take with you?” 

She nods solemnly. “He never let me buy things of my own, and all of his belongings only made me feel sick to my stomach, so I left them all behind.” 

We’re sitting against the wall of my bedroom with a blanket spread across both our laps. The blinds are closed but every 3 minutes a light outside the window flickers on and then off again. For a brief second I can see her face as she is speaking, and though she does not look sad, there is deep regret and grief hidden behind a soft smile she uses to protect her dignity. 

“Eloise and I had been friends since we were but girls. She lived down the street from my mother and I. We went to the same school in elementary, but when we got old enough for junior high, Eloise and her family moved to a different state. I thought I would never see her again. That is, until college.” 

Watching her retell the story is like watching someone fall in love for the first time. She smiles and stares off affectionately as though she can still hear the giggling of two young girls unaware of what life would later do to them. 

“I still remember the first time I saw her again. We had the same major, which means we were in the same classes. She was sitting in the very front row of the classroom, and though we had both grown up, I could still recognize my very best friend. We quickly became attached at the hip like nothing had ever changed; we never did anything without each other. She was my first roommate, the first person I ever shared a home with beyond my own mother.” 

“Did you know that you were in love with her?” 

“I did. But I convinced myself it was merely love for a very close friend. I was afraid of how she would react if I dared to tell her what exactly she meant to me. How can two women in the 1950s share feelings only meant for a man and his ‘objects’?”

The reality behind her statement feels like a stab to my heart. I can hear the many sermons I was subjected to about the true definition of love. How love comes from a heavenly father and perfect love only exists through his divine instruction. How marriage was to be only between a man and a woman, but is that not really just an excuse for men to subject women to their whims and ways of abuse? How is it we continue to say that hate is always hate, but love isn’t love unless it's graced with god's name? 

“When did she find out? That you thought of her as more than a friend.” I ask.

“A few months after I moved in.” She rings her hands in her lap. “It is hard to hide your affection for someone when it runs so deeply that you cannot even find its beginning.”

“What happened?” I prompt, although I am aware that she may not be willing to share. 

“We were cleaning up around her house one day while her husband was away at work. She was changing the sheets in her bedroom and I was downstairs sweeping when suddenly I knocked a dish off the counter and it shattered on the floor. She heard it crash and came downstairs to see what had happened.”

1954

“Greta?” Eloise yells from the bedroom upstairs. “Greta, is everything okay?” 

“Yes, sorry, I knocked a dish off the counter.” Greta is kneeling on the floor picking up pieces of glass with her bare hands. Eloise walks into the kitchen and quickly kneels down to force Greta to stand and step away from the glass. 

“Don’t touch it, you could cut yourself.” She searches around and finds the broom then begins to sweep up the shards. 

“I’m so sorry, Eloise. I was careless and bumped into it. I will buy you a new glass to replace it, I promise.” 

Eloise smiles to herself before turning to Greta. “Do not apologize, accidents happen. Let me get this cleaned up and then we can talk.” As she goes back to sweeping, she notices a small drop of blood on the ground next to a large piece of glass. She bends down to inspect it and then quickly stands up and grabs Greta's hands. “Did you get hurt? There is blood on the floor.” She flips Greta's hands over and notices a long thing cut along one of Greta's fingers. 

“I did not even notice. It doesn’t hurt.” Greta admits. 

“But still, you are hurt.” Eloise puts down the broom and immediately begins to search the cabinets for a bandage and something to clean the wound. “You can’t let it get infected, I will clean it for you.”

Greta stands just outside the kitchen and waits for Eloise to find what she is looking for. Once she gets the supplies she needs, Eloise grabs Greta's hands again and pulls her toward the couch in the living room. She sternly orders her to sit down and then kneels in front of her. 

“I will put a bandage on this and then we can clean up the rest of the glass.” Her brows are furrowed and she looks concerned as she assesses the damage on Greta's finger. “You cannot be getting hurt, it makes me worry.” 

Gretas sits on the couch in a speechless daze and watches as Eloise gently pours a small amount of alcohol on a rag and dabs at the cut. Her worry confuses Greta and the sound of her heart beating echoes in her ears. It is so loud she is convinced there is no way Eloise cannot hear it. Her body jolts with electricity every time Eloise carefully touches her hands. She dares not utter a word for she knows her mouth would give way to what her body is feeling. 

“Next time, I will do the sweeping and you can change the sheets.” Eloise looks up briefly at Greta before going back to bandaging her finger. “That way you cannot get injured again, at least, not this easily.”

After she finishes wrapping Greta's finger, Eloise continues to hold Greta's hands as she kneels in front of her. She looks up at Greta and notices that her color seems off and it looks as though she has lost control of her breathing. 

“Greta? Is something else wrong?” She quickly reaches for Greta's forehead and in doing so pushes Greta back against the couch with Eloise landing on top of her. 

What was only seconds plays out in Greta's mind in complete slow motion. She wraps her arms around Eloise in instinct and holds her closely. Their eyes stay locked and their breathing almost intertwines. The closeness of their bodies sends Greta's mind reeling and in a rash decision made by an irrational mind, she allows herself to lean forward even more. Her movement is slow enough to give Eloise a chance to move away, play ignorance, and continue on as though nothing had ever happened, but for Eloise, the same slow motion scene is playing out in her head. She does not move as she should, even though she knows how this will end, and instead she lets Greta take control for just a second. Their lips meet softly and their breath now truly intertwines. Greta can feel as her heart rate threatens to make her heart explode. But before reality can fully sink in, Eloise pushes off of her chest and moves to the other side of the room. Her hand absently traces her lips as her thoughts move at a hundred miles a minute. Greta apologizes profusely and swears it was an accident, but both of them are aware that they are accomplices in a love that never should have happened. 

Present Day

That was the story Greta told me the last time I saw her. 

The next night I slept for so long that you would have thought I was dead. My psychiatrist says my meds must have finally kicked in, my mom believes prayers were being answered (but I wasn’t even praying them), and I don’t know what to believe. All I know is I lost a dear friend. Every night when I close my eyes and find myself drifting off to dreamland, I hope that Greta can find her way to me again. Alas, she has not, yet is what I’ll say, and truly I believe it is because she fulfilled what she came here to get. 

She needed a friend, just like I did. And when we got close enough for her to confide in me her deepest secrets, she checked off the last box on her hallucination bucket list. Never again was she given a conscience. 

Though I miss our late night talks, our gossip and the stories, I am grateful I can finally sleep peacefully. And when I get really sad, when it hits me how much I miss my hallucination, I simply tell myself that Greta and Eloise are out there somewhere wearing wedding rings and doing couple things. Because in the end, all I want for my dear friend, is that she can finally feel the happiness she never once got to live. 

And if I ever go manic, if I lose my ability to sleep again, I will pray to whatever god there is that Greta will find her way to me and finally be able to tell me the happy ending to her once tragic story.