“If you knew time as well as I do, you wouldn’t be wasting it”

Lewis Carroll


I liked to think that everything happened for a reason, that somewhere between space and time there were imaginary needles directing a whole universe.

That’s why I could feel how those needles stopped dead in their tracks when I met him: when I met the Mad Man.

Every time I saw him, his gaze was flooded with an out-of-this-world magic, an unreal magic.

So, the moment when the bike that was travelling at breakneck speed skidded in the snow, as I clung tightly to the waist of my lord of darkness, I knew that his eyes would be the ones that would keep me in this world, just as my sister’s frozen hand plunged me into the abyss.

I could feel the beautiful wind whipping through my white ringlets, hear the laughter of my fellow adventurer as he accelerated the vehicle only comparable to a racehorse when a white hare appeared on the road bringing us crashing down with a hard impact.

Seconds.

It only took a few seconds to destroy that castle of dreams as we fell through what seemed like fields of pain and darkness.

-Mirana! - his voice searching for me anchored me to this reality as nothing else could have done. In the same way I searched for him by touch only to find my body motionless.

I was lying on the filthy floor crawling on the ground, yet I was not moving, I had no pulse. And yet, the next thing I felt was a hand.

A cold hand was gripping me.

His hand. Bringing me back.

...

“Mirana?” Rose’s voice brought me back to reality “Mirana?”

“Rose?” I asked sleepily with my body still dancing between the valley of dreams and the shifting sands of reality.

“Seba…?” I began to ask as my throat closed completely.

“Wait,” she handed me a glass of water carefully and helped me to sit up completely, “Ace is fine, she was discharged this morning, her wounds were superficial.”

“She’s fine,” I whispered relaxing every muscle in my body as a jolt of Deja Vu hit me like a bucket of cold water, “Wait…” I held my head carefully, “What did you just say?”

“You don’t remember?” she asked in alarm “you and your parents had an accident.”

“No” I denied in anguish with my heart squeezing like an orange “we had an accident a fortnight ago” I reminded her “I just had an accident with Sebastian.”

“Sebastian?” she asked confused

“Sebastian!” I shrieked, wanting to get out of my own body “Sebastian, Sebastian Grenville!”

“Sebastian Dubois?” she asked with a deathly pallor that bordered that building “Sebastian died on the 10th of November, darling.”

“No,” I denied with grief and pain twisting my mind, my insides, begging me to go back to my world and get away from that one.

“Honey…” Rose held my hand gently “Sebastian committed suicide, he fell off the roof.”

“But I saw him!” a lonely bark came from my soul

“Yes, beautiful,” she nodded with tears in her eyes, “but you saw him that day on the roof, he died that night”

The sound of a ticking clock flooded my mind as the scenes of the last few days lined up until I heard his voice, in a memory.

“I’ll see you soon”

“I don’t think so, Mirana”

...

It was just a dream.

A dream that had made me wake up in a withered reality.

Reality was something I had always feared, over the years I had taken refuge in a cloud of fantasy and hope as my reality completely crumbled. Those needles that I thought at some point had stopped only ran over me, throwing every piece of my being away, taking away something I never really had. Those needles turned me into what I had always feared.

A spectre.

I held the flowers that smelled of doom and looked at the hand-carved gravestone full of flaws, of lies.

Sebastian Grenville

Born: 9 September 1971

Died: 10 November 1988

Illegitimate son of Marcus Dubois

No next of kin.

Rest in peace.

I shook with tears in my eyes and held up the black marker and added with a pure love, comparable only to the love that death had for life;

A friend,

An artist,

A dreamer,

The Mad Man.

I nodded with a smile clinging to those stolen moments and with a spoonful of courage I whispered;

-Hello Angel

It had all been a dream.

Hadn’t it?