The phone call ended, but my mind desperately rejected the vacuum of reality. When the car finally returned to our gate and my relatives carried my mother back into the house, my brain simply seized. They're joking, I told myself, a manic defense mechanism kicking in. It's all a lie. A twisted prank.
I looked down at her still form on the cold floor, and my internal gears stopped working entirely. I knew it was her, but it didn't feel real. It felt like I was watching a detached movie of someone else's miserable life. The ambient noise of the weeping relatives went completely quiet. I tried to speak, to scream, to demand answers, but I had forgotten how to make sounds. I just stood there, a frozen monument of stone.
I kept waiting for her to move. When her chest remained entirely still, the world felt like it violently broke in half.
Desperate to shatter the illusion, I made a massive, agonizing mistake.
I reached out and pulled on her arm. Wake up, I thought, waiting for her to open her eyes and tell me it was just a terrible nightmare. I pulled harder, shaking her cold limbs, believing that if I was disruptive enough, she would snap out of it. But she remained entirely motionless. Her skin felt as chillingly cold as a piece of ice.
"This isn't real," my mind chanted like a mantra. "This is just a nightmare."
I grabbed her hand to pull her completely up, but her body was heavy, limp, and unresponsive. That was when the final anchor of my denial was violently ripped away. A dark, visceral line of blood began to seep from her nose. It was dark, stark, and horrifyingly real.
The sight of that blood made everything crash down on me with the weight of an avalanche. The heat of the absolute shock hit my face, and my heart hammered so violently I thought it would explode within my ribs. I wanted to scream a mountain of agony into the room, but no sound came out. My brain simply gave up. It was too much to see. It was too much to feel.
The blackness rushed in swiftly from the corners of my eyes, and I finally let go of my grip on reality. My mind shut the door and turned off the lights. I fell into the dark, praying I would never have to wake up and remember what I had just witnessed.
But the dark didn't keep me forever.
When I finally drifted back to consciousness, the silence of the room was heavy. My whole life, I had been the fragile one. I was the notorious cry-baby who wept at every small slight, every harsh word, and my mother had always been the one to pull me into her lap and console me. Yet, as I looked at her lying there, her body turning to ice, I couldn't cry. Not a single shred of a teardrop came to my eyes.
My neighbors, who deeply loved my mother and cared for us, crowded around my frozen form. Shocked by my eerie, hollow expression, one of them raised her hand and slapped me across the face, hard.
"Cry, Iris!" she wept, shaking me by my shoulders. "Why are you not crying? You always cry like a baby over the smallest things! Why are you acting like a stone now? You need to cry!"
They pleaded with me, they struck me, but my tear ducts remained as dry as bone. It was an unimaginable, terrifying realization: I had no idea why the tears wouldn't come. I was a statue. The pain was there, buried miles deep, but my body was completely numb. I couldn't feel my own weight. I couldn't even stand up on my own two feet.
Because my sister was heavily pregnant and unable to bear the physical strain, the duty fell entirely on me. "You have to do it, Iris. She loved you the most. You must perform the funeral rituals."
I had completely lost my senses, moving like a ghost trapped in a physical shell. I didn't know what to do or how to move. Seeing me collapse inward, the aunt who had first broken the news to me stepped forward. She gently slipped her arms under mine, physically helping me to stand up. Without her support, I would have crumbled onto the floor. Holding onto her strength, I let her guide my lifeless hands through the grueling funeral work.
Hours dissolved into a blurred mist of rituals, incense, and burning wood. My friends stayed by my side, frantically requesting me to eat something, but my throat was entirely constricted. I hadn't eaten a single thing since the tiny bite I took the night before to keep my promise to my father. I was a dead person walking among the living.
By the time the final rituals were completed, memory failed me. I couldn't remember the walk back. I didn't remember how I reached our front gate. I only knew that I eventually stumbled back into our empty home, mechanically forced some food down my throat, and collapsed into my bed.
In the quiet sanctuary of sleep, my mother came to me.
She looked radiant, completely healthy, and whole. She smiled warmly at me and whispered, "I'm alright, Iris. Everything was just a show. They have all been deceiving you because you are so wonderfully simple and believe in everything so easily." In the logic of the dream, the relatives appeared behind her, laughing and making fun of my gullible nature. I felt a profound, surging wave of relief. 'It was just a trick'.
Then, the sharp ring of a telephone or a distant voice shattered the illusion. Someone was calling my name.
The transition from the dream to the waking world was like being plunged headfirst into ice water. One moment, I was bathed in the warm, protective glow of my mother's presence, feeling completely safe and seen; the next, I was just a seventeen-year-old girl in an empty bed, staring at a ceiling that seemed a million miles away.
The contrast was pure, unadulterated agony. In my sleep, I had been whole. But the harsh morning light immediately revealed the jagged, bleeding edges of my grief. It was a hollow, aching sensation—as if the dream had intentionally carved out a massive void in my heart just to show me exactly how much of my universe was now missing.
I lay there completely paralyzed by the cruel mercy of my subconscious, listening to the hollow, mechanical ticking of the clock on the wall—each second marking a future I had absolutely no idea how to live.