Sequoia

The truth has a price. The price of knowing. The way it will haunt you till you take your last breath.

This is the one quote that has stuck. She said it to me many times. Mother I mean. She had so many little pieces of advice and whenever they come back to me I write them down in my notebook. I have pages of them and they never stop coming.

I woke up thinking about the dream I have every night about my mom. It always goes like this, I wake up because of my broken wrist. I get out of bed to get some water when I hear it. It sounds like muffled shouting. I grab the knife from the nightstand. I walk out into that hallway and see a door partially open at the far left side of it.

I quickly creep up to the door and peek inside. The moment I look in, the screaming begins. Shrill and high. A voice so full of pain and despair that I want to run back to my room when I heard it. A voice telling a story of death. I look in again and see her, my mother, lying there with blood seeping from a wound on her head. Her light blue cloak with spotted red staining it. my father, standing there with a knife over her.

I freeze in the doorway for a second. “No, no, no!” I say quietly at first and then in a scream of anger and fear I careen in and leep at father with my knife brandished. I slice at him and stab at him. I managed to cut open his leg. He aimes a blow at me and it hits me in the chest knocking me against the wall, forcing the air from me. I smash into a mirror and a piece of glass slices my left cheekbone. I sit, trying to get up and when I get my breath back, I freeze when I see it. The slicing motion, that final scream, and my mother looking into my eyes for the very last time. All sound leaves the world. I run to my mother's side trying to wake her but not succeeding. The sound came rushing back. “ She's gone. It’s done.” I hear my father mutter. And then he knelt down and placed a flower in my mother's hair and leaves the room with tears in his eyes.

That’s it. The same dream that I have had for weeks. Mother dying again and again inside my head. Not the dream I would like to have on a daily basis. Although it's not just a dream, it actually happened. I see her lying there with a flower in her hair when I see father. This has been in my dreams for the last three weeks.

My stomach grumbles for food so I get out of bed, get dressed, and head to the kitchen to get some pastries. My brother Tyron meets me in the kitchen looking deep in thought. “What's wrong? I ask him, forgetting about the dream.