The Sand Girl

I don't even know lol.

Running frantically down the dark hallway, I turned back to see nothing. Had I imagined it? Still running, I turned back around, stifling a scream as a hand reached out to strangle my neck. Instincts kicked in as I pushed the hand away. Sand held to my hand from the contact, leaving me with a burning curiosity. I turned left into the main hall, seeing the leg extended to trip me a second too late. Rolling onto my back, I looked up to see a young girl that looked like me, except she had cracks in her skin and seemed to be made out of a desert. Her hand was extended to touch my face; I reached up to grab the lamp off the table and swung. Sand scattered around me, like snow in winter, except sand is bitter, where snow is soft and beautiful. I didn't know where the sand-girl came from, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to know. I lay panting from shock. My heart was racing 100 miles per hour. I finally managed to build up courage to move so I immediately went to the computer to find a psychiatrist. What I saw couldn't possibly be real, except the sand was still there...

After I found the right psychiatrist, and made an appointment for Tuesday 19th, I went to hoover up the mess. When I came back, though, the sand had formed back into the sand woman. Specks of sand kept falling down, and when enough had fallen, she bent over and started writing, pushing the sand with her finger to form words. "Don't touch me. I want to be your friend" she wrote. I figured if she melted the last time I touched her, it'd happen again. I reached out with my hand to touch her, but as I did, her own arm lashed out and her hand was around my wrist. I screamed in shock, frantically trying to get her off.

As I looked back to her face, I saw water trickling from her left eye. I gazed in pure horror, but remembered I had a psychiatrist appointment exactly for this, and that it wasn't real. I closed my eyes and told myself over and over that it isn't real. The pressure on my hand started to dissipate, and my breathing slowed. It's not real, not real; it's all in your head.

As the sun rose up the next morning, the light shining through my slightly open blinds, I realized it was all a dream. There was no sand-girl. Everything was normal. But little did I know then, that nothing to come was normal. I went to my college classes as normal, majoring in computers. I didn't have many friends, so I just went through classes as usual. Today we were studying Java programming; I understood it like an expert. The rest of my classes (English, Math, etc.) were challenging, though. I had a minor in Brain Disorders, so I was studying dreams. Closely related, but not the exact same thing. There were no searches for "Sand Girl" in Google...

As I got home that night, I went straight to the computer. I had a project to hand in tomorrow. I'd already completed half of it the night before, before that dream... The project was to write a program for kids to practice basic math. Buttons to change from multiplication to addition and subtraction. I found it easy since I learned about it in high school, but I was sure the other people were struggling, as I could tell from the questions they were tyros. As I finished up the project and saved it on a flash-drive, I decided to Google "sand woman" again. No results. "Sand girl looks like me". No results that had any relation to the questions I had. I decided it didn't matter. The day was Friday, so I could take sleeping-aids to help with my sleep. I swallowed the pills down with water, and went to sleep.