Do you believe that the worst experiences in life can be seen coming, or are you one of those who think that the worst feelings in our lives come without warning, all at once? Honestly, there are things that you can see approaching from afar, but others just hit you in the face so suddenly that you could never have even been prepared for it. As was my case.
That night, after a regular dinner, I can say, my girlfriend and I went to bed, after a long day at work. Things in the company had been a bit tense those last days, it was the hardest part of the year, on the one hand, there were some port protests that prevented normal exports, generating large economic losses daily, and that added to the shortage of qualified personnel to cover the key points made things difficult. Working twelve hours a day for six days a week, yes, is exhausting, but it is more bearable when you don't have such a heavy and constant load of stress over you. I wholeheartedly envy those who are able to "switch off" their nervousness and have an iron mettle. They seem to be able to make the best decisions calmly and serenely, no matter how great the chaos around them. How I wish I had that ability!
That night, restlessness tackled me, I suddenly felt heavy, tired, burdened, even in the privacy of my sleep, where I was supposed to relax and enjoy myself and instead, it did nothing but tire me down more and more. The nightmares were recurring, and sometimes, I just wished I could wake up or even, not dream at all and be able to accumulate enough rest to perform the next day. But that night things were different. Suddenly, a sense of grief enveloped me, I felt my heart clench, shrink, my lungs seemed to be being crushed, and the feeling that I was going to die was totally real. I opened my eyes, to find that I was totally unable to make any abrupt movement, but I could yet make slight movements. I could not scream either. I began to turn slowly towards my girlfriend to get her attention, because I knew that she was such a light sleeper that at the slightest movement, she would react.
That was a harder task than I could have imagined, and what ended up making me sink into despair in the middle of that moment was the image I could see when I finished turning: The bed was full of blood everywhere, my girlfriend’s face had a huge vertical cut and another horizontally, and her expression was of pure terror and pain. I could also see several blood stains on her clothes, what I thought had been several stab wounds, and while I still couldn't move, tears began to fall from my eyes in torrents, thinking and condemning myself harshly on how it had been possible that something like that had happened right next to me and I hadn't noticed, or what kind of pathetic person I am, that I wasn’t able to protect her from whatever it was that had done that to her, but she lay there, still, rigid, lifeless in her eyes, without breathing, while both my insides and my whole world collapsed.
In a last conscious effort, I wanted to reach out to her, to check if she was still alive, and I managed to stretch out my hand towards her, and the moment my fingers made contact with her face, her image vanished in front of me. The light in the room suddenly turned on, and my girlfriend, who had gone to the bathroom a moment before, found me having a strong panic attack, which, as they explained to us later, after a medical and psychological check-up, had also triggered a psychotic episode with hallucinations.
It is one thing to have a predisposition to certain mental conditions, but whoever reads this, you should know that stress can become really scary when you are constantly receiving large doses.