Looking for a reason.

I ran, as fast as I could. A direction unknown and a heart beating no longer in my chest but in my head. I couldn't hear anything but my rasping breath and the sound of my feet hitting the wet pavement. Knowledge was seized by a force responsible for my sense of direction. Though I had no direction, I knew I was following something, chasing whatever this thing was.

Lights flickered overhead as I made my way through the snow filled park. Flakes drifting gracefully found their resting place atop the crown of my head, filtering through my hair, clinging to my eyelashes. Their soft imaginative fantasy broken by the shattering reality of the chaos developing in my mind. "Nightmares aren't real. They aren't under your bed, or hiding in your closet. There are no monsters or ghouls. No scary beasts lurking when you turn out the light", my mum would tell me. Her words would play on my mind constantly, telling me that the monsters of my dreams didn't exist. How could she say that when the monsters visited me in the plain daylight? When they spoke to me just as if they were my school friends? Sometimes, these monsters even were my school friends. These monsters weren't scary ghouls under my beds, or night time scary stories told at sleepovers: This was a monster trapped inside the body of a little girl. And tonight, I'd decided to escape her.

As I ran, I ran after what now looked like a man. He was tall, but too far into the distance for my tear ridden eyes to see. I pushed on, though the pain in my legs was unbearable and the beat of my heart could be heard in my head. Then it came, the flash of light, the sound of rain, the images in my head, over and over again. I was standing on the curb of a street, ground to a halt. No longer running, no longer searching. It was all over.