I’ve always had trouble sleeping at night. Noises have disturbed me my whole life. I found out years ago that I have Hyperacusis (hypersensitive hearing), picking up all sorts of background noises.
Doctors couldn’t fix it, they only recommend the obvious techniques to mask the problem. Not that I hadn’t tried these already.
Ear muffs, listening to music, and even things like meditation. None of it worked. In fact, it made the situation worse. It made her more desperate.
I hear her most nights, no one else can. Why does she only come to me? There’s always the dread of lying there each night in dark silence, anticipating when she will come, and when I will hear her again. Usually, she likes to wait until I’m drifting to sleep, so that I jump back to my senses in fright to the sound of her presence.
Most of the time it begins with faint crying. She tells me that she “wants to make it end.” I know she’s getting closer to getting me and some nights I can even feel her cold breath in my ear.
I can sense when she is lying close beside me in the darkness staring at me, and sometimes she whispers things like “It’s only me,” right into my ear. She’s toying with me, like a cat does to a helpless insect before killing it. The thing is, I could never see her, but it slowly felt like she was becoming more real.
The doctor later informed me that I suffer from schizophrenia. I have been taking medication for a long time but it wasn’t really working. It just made me feel more helpless. It was difficult for a girl as young as me to deal with this. At least now I could accept that she wasn’t real. It was all in my head and there was nothing real to fear. That was until last night…
Last night, her presence felt more real than ever. I could hear her whisper, feel breathing on my neck and even smell her breath, it was all too realistic to handle. I got so scared that I fell back into my old habit of running through the darkness of the house into my mother’s bed to sleep beside her where I felt safe.
Now that I was older, I knew she was hoping I had grown out of this phase, although I had only stopped doing it because it made her sad, and I didn’t want her to be disappointed in me anymore. She was all I had. If I had the choice I would be in there beside her every night without fail.
I knew my mother had been awoken by me, probably more saddened that I reverted to old ways when she thought the medication had been helping me. But it wasn’t helping, I lied all this time to keep her happy and let her sleep in peace.
I curled up in bed beside her and began to sob quietly. My mum looked uncomfortable from the noise I had made, and began stirring under the sheets so I whispered into her ear… “It’s only me.” She sat up abruptly, looking anxious. In the darkness I saw her reach over for her cell phone and begin to dial a number. I noticed on the screen that she was calling the doctor.
“The voices I used to hear,” she said. “They’re back…”
Story source unknown.
