The Lugubrious Disasters

Tanya - The Scholar

"Tanya, would you like share your disaster, today?" Rayna asked, she was the one who created the rehab center, she was the one who saw it all; she saw it happen to every single girl, and she stopped seeing it happen to the girls when she saw her own, we all saw hers, then once it happened, she created this place;

The Disaster Rehabilitation Centre; Rayna was this teeny tiny little woman, but her passion was larger than life, about the rehab center, about the girls, about her children, her husband; she was the reason every girl came here and continued to come here; because she understood us, helped us, and wanted to help us.

I nodded, "Where should I start?" I asked, after a moment.

"Wherever you feel comfortable, sweetheart." Rayna told me, reassuringly, she smiled at me.

"I believe it started a while before the actual event—disaster—almost exactly a year ago..."

I was wandering through the halls when I thought I felt eyes watching me, voices whispering in my ear, but I could never find them, when I told my father about it, he just brushed it off, "Ohh, it's probably just nothing, Tanya, you're probably just imagining things."

I was never able to convince him something was watching me, that something was following me, no matter what I said, no matter how many times I tried to convince him; he never listened, he never believed me, I even tried telling him I knew something was going to happen to me, I tried telling him how I had seen it in a dream, but he wouldn't listen, and he didn't believe me until it happened.

It was three months before my eighteenth birthday, I was walking home from night school; I had been taking night classes, attempting to get my grades up to apply to Stanford, it was nearly pitch black; most of the street lights hadn't been replaced when all the power went out last month.

I got home pretty easily; no  harm done, I had a little time to do a quick study, my father went to bed early, as I was supposed to do as well; I did everything I was supposed to do, then headed to bed.

He thought I was crazy, he basically interrogated me on trying to figure out how I knew it was going to happen; but everytime I said that I saw it in a dream; he'd brush the whole 'dream' off, saying, "Tanya, this is enough; you cannot predict the future; stop pretending."

My mother and brother were worried, but they both agreed with my father; thinking that I needed professional help, but I would refuse, pretending and telling them it was most likely nothing.

It made no sense to my family, to my friends, nobody understood; they couldn't, and after a week of having that same dream, every night; no one would listen to me, about it, anymore.

I was scared; the dream was terrifying, and I was particularly sure that it was going to happen to me, but after two weeks of having this nightmare; I thought that, maybe that was all it was; a nightmare that my mind kept twisting out of control.

A week later, I was still having the dream, and I was actually considering my family's idea of the psychiatrist, I decided I would sleep on the idea and ask my parents about it in the morning.

I threw on some simple pajamas and climbed into my queen-sized bed; it took me a while to fall asleep, I just kept tossing and turning; thinking about the nightmare, playing it out in my head, but everytime I did; I couldn't breathe and it terrified me so much more.

(*******)

I woke up sometime later; I didn't know what time it was but it seemed to be night, still, or very early in the morning, that's just what it felt like anyways.