17. A Terrifying Phone Call
My grandmother died of brain cancer about twenty years ago. About two weeks after she died I was hanging out over at my parent’s place and my mom got a call – no number, no unknown number, just blank caller ID. She answered it, got quiet, hung up and went to her room without saying anything. When I finally got her to talk about it she said it was her mother, saying she was trapped and please come get her because they wouldn’t let her leave, over and over again, and then the phone disconnected. I asked her about it a few years ago and she denied that it happened for a bit and then admitted that it had happened two more times that year and then stopped, but she didn’t want to discuss it any more.
18. The Children In Pajamas
A few years ago,my sister was married to a solider in the British Army and he was stationed in Germany. We all visited her and she knew I was interested in history so for a day out, we visited Belsen Bergen,the former Nazi concentration camp. As we were walking around,my sister was pushing the pram with my nephew in it, he was 1 or 2 years old at the time. The thing about Belsen Bergen is that after the way,it was burnt to the ground so it’s more or less blank fields. As we walked, we passed a tree when my nephew asked my sister who the kids were behind us. We all turned around and no one was there. My sister asked which kids, and he replied “the ones in the pajamas”. Yet again, no kids anywhere to seen. We all knew for a fact that he has no idea what country he was in, let alone know about the horrible events which occurred at that camp.
19. Homesickness
Two years ago, I woke up around 1:00 AM thinking, “I can never go home again.” It was the most intense sense of homesickness I’ve ever experienced, full of panic and regret. I tried to calm myself down – logically, of course I could. My parents lived just a couple hours away, still in my childhood home. I’d fought hard to get away from the suburb I grew up in, so why this sudden intense longing?
The next day, I got a call that my dad had been hospitalized during the night and was in the ICU. He didn’t make it out. And while the house is still there, it’s not home anymore.
