When life becomes too hard to bear alone, someone comes along to bear it with you.
A girl thriving on light and colour meets a boy trapped in darkness; their souls connect, and together they find love and healing... or something profound and corny l...
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A girl wearing a rainbow is marching towards me from over the hill. She's walking with purpose, and if she stays on her current course, her route is going to bring her right up to me. The doctor did warn me about vivid dreams and even hallucinations as possible side effects of the medication I'm currently on, but he never said that it would be this overwhelming and colourful.
I am sitting on a huge fallen tree in the middle of nowhere, wishing that I could be anywhere else. Any dimension would do or, even better, not exist at all.
I push my face into the palms of my hands, willing my mind to clear.
The girl is still coming towards me when I look up again. I repeat the process over and over, but she's not disappearing. In fact, she is a little bit closer each time I take my hands away. I've often seen this kind of effect in horror movies. A ghost or monster appears and seems to come closer by leaps and bounds each time the victim blinks. It feels freakishly similar, except that the girl isn't scary, and I can make out more and more details as she comes closer, details I really didn't think were possible in hallucinations.
Strands of her long, straight hair, the colour of warm honey, are braided, seemingly at random, while the rest are flowing freely in the wind. She's wearing a loose, purple spaghetti-strapped top over a neon green t-shirt. A black and yellow chequered pleated skirt reaches more or less mid-thigh, and her knee-high socks don't match at all. One is red and covered in green apple slices, and the other has cherries on a sunny yellow background. Her feet are hiding in black combat boots that look tough enough to kick-start a Boeing.
She finally arrives, stopping right in front of me, and I fully expect her to pass right through me and disappear. She's not disappearing, and she's close enough for me to see that what I thought of as a purple top is actually a top covered in a crowd of pink and blue fairies. There are so many of them that the material appeared to be purple from a distance. I blink my eyes, shifting uneasily.
Am I supposed to greet her? Does one interact with hallucinations or pretend that they're not there? I'm not sure of the protocol. Experiencing hallucinations is still very new to me.
She doesn't say a word; she just sits down next to me.
She's short enough for her feet to be airborne once she's sitting on the tree stump, and I can smell her. Do hallucinations have a scent? Lily of the Valley. I know because Anara once had a bottle of the stuff, and she used it too liberally. This girl, however, didn't bathe herself in it; the scent is gentle and subtle, not as cloying and overwhelming as I always thought it was.
I dare to turn my head slightly to study her. I can't have such a vivid hallucination and not make a point of appreciating it fully. I am a little alarmed, but as hallucinations go, this one is a lot better than the red and green rabbits I saw running over my grandmother's rug last night. The rabbits kept on growing in number and in size until I was sure that I was going to be suffocated by a horde of the busy, rabid-looking creatures... and then I suddenly woke up in a heap on that same rug and the rabbits were gone. My mouth felt dry, and I was extremely nauseous.
