A Jolly Good Life

  Fear crept into her and tightened its noose around her heart. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder’ the doctors had called it. Her parents and even her younger sister had nodded wisely. As if they understood anything. AS IF. ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder’- Four meaningless words. All that she knew was that she would never be like the other children. She would never get to run. She would never get to dance at parties. The other kids would stare, they would not include her. She would never get to have a friend to pass a note to during class. She would never get to pretend to take unnecessary trips to the washroom so that she could talk to a friend. Simple things in life. She would never experience them. Post-traumatic stress disorder – the bane of her life. She would never be able to get in a car again. She had tried, really, but something stopped her each time. A cold voice inside her head telling her to stop, whispering threats, remindi...

     He glanced up at the poster on the opposite wall of his room. On it, were the golden words he’d lived his whole life by - ‘Life is a journey; heaven is the destination’. He still remembered the day they put that up. When he was six, his father had lifted him high in the air so he could pin up that poster.   And his mother had looked him in the eye and told him to remember these words all his life. Back then, he was just a typical bubbly 6year old whose life was confined to the safety of his parents’ arms. So much had changed in those 11 years. Here he was, 17 years old, staring at the same poster and wondering if his whole life had been a lie. Everything that he had done, was to please someone else. To make others happy. He had joined the football team at school to please his football crazy father. He hated football. He had joined the cricket team to be included by his cricket crazy friends. He hated cricket. He loved art. He wanted to draw and paint. To...