Henry Grieg; Depression

The Nightmare

The Nightmare always started the same: Henry sitting on a park bench. The plot was always different, but the characters were never changing.
❧ Pain was always the first to come, followed by Regret, then Depression. They always had the same speech, the words of which slip through Henry's mind every morning, and then She appears (that's a story for another time), tall and beautiful, and she speaks. But after she utters the first word, she's swallowed up by Blackness. ❧ This is normally the part where Henry wakes up, but he didn't. The Nightmare took another dark turn. Nightmares have a funny way of doing that; once you think it's over it's just begun.
❧ This time, he's at the cemetery, placing lilies ever so carefully upon his mother's grave, rearranging them. An onlooker would think he had a severe case of OCD, but he just wanted to make his mother proud.
❧"Putting those lilies there won't bring her back," said an old man, sitting on a bench next to the grave.
"Who are you?" asked Henry.
"I'm a new character," said the old man.
"What's your name?"
"Memory."
"Are you a Monster?"
"No, none of us are really Monsters, it's just how you interpret us."
This remark confused Henry; if a Monster really wasn't a Monster, then why did they look like monsters, and why did they have such awful names?
❧ It was at this moment The Nightmare ended. Henry woke and saw something startling standing in his bedroom.