Stillness

When I was a little girl I used to have a friend. He wasn't imaginary but he wasn't real either. At least not to those around me but to me he was just as real as you are. His name was stillness. He was always very nice to me when we played, a true gentleman in a girl's eyes and would tell me that he would always protect me. Whenever he came around it seemed like time stood still. We would play for hours in a square of moonlight that would wander in through my window until I would get tired. Then he would say goodbye and I would crawl into my bed. After I made sure I was comfortable, I would close my eyes and drift off to sleep only to wake up in what felt like minutes. The sun would be up and my dad would be getting set to take me to school while I still felt exhausted. In school I could hardly stay away and often found myself nodding off or waking up in a puddle of drool at the lunch table after the bell would ring. It was a nightmare during the day but I always found myself happier when I got home and finished my dinner. Stillness always made me feel better. Every night I looked forward to our play dates, they were always as long or as short as I wanted though whenever I would try to just go to sleep he would get mad. Sometimes I would wake up fully rested but with a strange emptiness inside and the day would seem to go by quicker than usual. Every time this happened, it seemed that time would just seem to get faster and faster. The only way I found that I could prevent or reverse this would be to accept playing with Stillness and when I did, yes I would be exhausted the next day but the world would resume its natural pace. But then I started to notice something strange. When I first started to play with him I was around 10 years old and measured about 125cm or little over 4 foot but by my 14th birthday I had only grown 5cm or 2 inches and I hadn't hit any milestones for a girl my age. My chest was still flat, my voice was still as high as ever and I didn't have any acne like the other girls my age. Also, it became increasingly difficult to deny playing with him and our play dates started to become unusually long. I would begin playing on Saturday around midnight as usual and would even go to sleep but when I would wake up it would only be Sunday morning. I wasn't the only one that noticed either. My mom had begun to get very concerned about me and started to take me to the doctor. After a few visits and a few more consultations, there wasn't anything wrong with me aside from a slight iron deficiency. In short, I was as healthy as I could be. Given that I hadn't been developing the way I should have been, on my 16th birthday I was prescribed hormone pills to jump start my delayed puberty and given a high-calorie diet planner to bring me up to weight. I didn't feel the need to eat very much, once a day was fine for a while but I would always be too full so I eventually began to hide my food and would eat only once every 3 days or so. Eventually puberty did set in and I was back on on track but was still behind by a few years. On my 18th birthday, I convinced my parents to let me put a down payment on a house using money I had saved up over the years from allowances and eventually from my paychecks. I managed to function with little or no sleep and was able to hold down a job so I didn't see an issue with living alone. Plus, Stillness didn't visit as often and felt that maybe he wouldn't follow me. I was horribly wrong. I chose a small barn-turned house on the outskirts of town. It was a two story home with large tracts of land surrounding it where I felt I could put my gardening skills to use. The first week was great. I moved in a single day and had everything put away by dinnertime that same day. Everything was going great and I even slept through the night without so much as a whisper to wake me up. I moved on a Saturday and exactly one week later, Stillness woke me up. He wasn't as friendly as before and seemed to want something more than just to play. He was violent, I had never seen him like this before. I chose to ignore his demands because I knew he couldn't hurt me physically but knew full-well that I would not be okay come morning. The following day went by in a matter of hours. I could see the shadows move and the sun noticeably make its journey from east to west as I stood on my porch. I had put a pot of water on the stove for tea and watched it boil away in a matter of seconds. Everything was going far quicker than it had ever before. That night I again, ignored his demands. The morning passed so quickly. My phone rang a couple times but I could never get to it in time even though I kept my finger on the answer button and eyes glued on the screen. I had missed 4 calls from my mom that day, all made an hour apart but to me it seemed that they would come in every 5 minutes or so. A week passed in just 24 hours and time only seemed to be getting faster until I finally gave in. It was Sunday at midnight when I agreed to play with him except he told me to wait until morning instead. Suddenly I felt very tired and dozed off on my couch. When I woke up, time seemed to have finally returned to normal. The shadows weren't racing across the floor and the sun stayed in place outside my kitchen window. I sighed in relief and placed a pot on the stove for tea. That was 3 days ago. The water is still cold to the touch, the fire barely feels warm and the sun is still casting light on my calendar over the stove on the wall in the same way. My doors won't open, the knobs simply won't turn, my windows are stuck and the glass won't break. My telephone doesn't turn on and the only thing I can do is write. I watched the second hand move for the first time since then so I know that time is still crawling along. I pray that someone comes looking for me and finds this letter. Decades will pass before noon and I hope I'm still alive by the time anyone finds me. I hope someone is looking. In the meantime, I'll see if I can find Stillness. Love, Astrid.