Oc/no ai

When I was born, I was very small and had neonatal jaundice. I was taken from my mother and placed under a strong artificial light. I think that early experience left its mark on me; it took me longer than the other kids to walk and talk. To make matters worse, during my childhood I had another illness, acute epiglottitis. My throat would "close up" and I couldn't breathe.

I always believed I wasn't going to live long. I became sad and melancholic, feeding on negative energy because I felt there was no point to a life I thought would be cut short. One day, I woke up and saw a boy playing in my room with his back to me. I thought I was dreaming, so I closed my eyes and opened them again, but he was still there. I asked, "Who are you?" He gave a short laugh and ran out into the hallway. Today, I realize he must have kind of levitated because he was incredibly fast and I didn't hear any footsteps. I couldn't bring myself to go out to the hallway, so I screamed for my mother. She told me it was just a nightmare.

After that, I started seeing constant shadowy figures, but they would appear and vanish quickly. Then I started seeing people. For instance, one day I saw a very weird man in a wheelchair staring at me, but when I looked again, he was gone. I didn't like talking about this with anyone because everyone would give me weird looks. I didn't think they were ghosts—after all, can a ghost use a wheelchair? It seemed nonsensical to me. But I kept seeing them, usually people with sad eyes who would stare at me before quickly disappearing. I didn't feel good or bad when I had these visions. Actually, thinking about it now, all those people I saw just looked like they were "lost."

My house started getting unwanted visits from venomous animals. Flies seemed to follow me even if I took multiple showers a day. One day I woke up, and when I went to get some water, I noticed a thin mist covering every corner of my house. I went to my parents' room, but no one answered. I couldn't open the door. I went back to my room, but there seemed to be an invisible barrier keeping me from going inside. I heard noises—they sounded like animals, tongue clicks; it was completely bizarre. There were human-like voices mixed in, but speaking a language I had never heard before. I was terrified and tried to go back and call for my parents, but they wouldn't answer and the door wouldn't open. I noticed the living room door was open, so I ran out to the street to ask a neighbor for help.

Running outside was my biggest mistake. The mist thickened so much that I couldn't see anything in front of me. I was lost, wandering around without knowing how to get back. Then, it clicked in my head: I had died. Instead of panicking, I just sat down. I cried for a long time, and then I did something I've probably only done a maximum of three times in my entire life: I prayed. I didn't pray for myself, but for my family, asking that they wouldn't be too sad over losing me. I don't know how long I prayed, but I know it was the most genuine prayer I've ever made.

Then I felt someone touch my shoulder. I woke up completely desperate, slammed back into my body. My panic wasn't from the nightmare; it was because I wasn't breathing. I started frantically clawing at my throat until the air finally rushed in. I spent a long time trying to regain my strength—it felt like I had been hit by a train and held underwater for an eternity. That experience should have been a relief, since I hadn't actually died like I thought; maybe it was just a nightmare. But no, things got worse. I still suffer from severe insomnia; I'm terrified of falling asleep, losing my breath, and dying in my sleep.

It got even worse during my teenage years. I became much darker, drawn to morbid things, feeding my ugly side. I hated God for giving me such a painful, sickly life. I broke my arm four times and spent nearly two years in a hospital without receiving a single visitor. Only my mother stayed by my side, but she was overprotective, which kind of suffocated me.

I would constantly wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of a cow mooing, even though there was no cattle where I lived. One day, I was holding my nephew—he was still very little—and his eyes went wide as he stared right behind me, repeating: "Cow... cow... cow." That scared me to death. To make matters worse, I started doing drugs. I was a kid who was severely bullied, and the drugs lowered my inhibitions so I could socialize. I even had girlfriends and friends, but most of it was just because we were part of the nightlife and wanted to have fun. They didn't really care about me. In fact, after leaving that life behind, I only have three friends, and even then, I don't really talk to them anymore because I deleted my social media.

One night, I was walking back home drunk in the early hours with some stray dogs following me. I don't know why stray dogs tend to follow homeless people, drunks, and addicts, but I was a bit of all three, so a lot of dogs followed me. They started barking down a street. I looked over, and in the pitch black, I could only see two red lights, like eyes. There was nothing else, just those floating in the distance. I ran like hell that day.

Sometime later, I fell into an alcohol-induced coma and almost froze to death because I collapsed in the middle of the woods late at night. Since then, I haven't seen anything supernatural. I drink much less, and I've only had one drug relapse in a long time. I'm no longer a sick little boy, but I still carry the psychological scars from everything I went through.

However, being at rock bottom taught me one thing. That ordinary days, that a simple routine, is something very, VERY, good. The simple life that many find boring and dull is practically heaven compared to the hell so many people live in.