MidReal Story
Whispers of the Forgotten: A Haunting Reckoning
Scenario: Ramon hasn’t contacted home in over ten years, now that he’s in Vancouver and started a new life for himself. But the ghosts, and ghost stories, of his childhood have come to haunt him. He can’t seem to get away from the old woman in white who closely resembles La Llorona, the myth that drowned her children and roams in search of them.
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But I know one thing for sure: I have to face them all before I can truly be free.
It’s been ten years since I left Vancouver.
I’ve been running from my past for ten years.
But I can’t run anymore.
And I’ve finally come back.
I’m back in Vancouver, and I’m going to face my demons.
The rain-soaked city welcomes me with open arms—or maybe it’s just the ghostly figure wrapped in a white gown.
I’m going to visit my father’s grave, and I’m going to confront the ghost of La Llorona that haunts me.
La Llorona has always been a part of me.
I’ve been dreaming of her for years, and now it’s time to find out what she wants from me.
A figment of my imagination.
A creation of my fears.
The taxi driver drops me off at the entrance to the cemetery, and I pay him without looking at the fare.
A reflection of the secrets I tried to keep hidden from the world.
I don’t care how much it costs.
She has haunted me in dreams for as long as I can remember.
I just want to get this over with.
It’s a cloudy day in Vancouver, and the air is cool and damp.
Weeping at the edge of the river.
The cemetery is quiet, except for the sound of crows cawing in the distance.
Looking for her lost children.
I walk down the path between the gravestones, looking for my father’s grave.
I want to tell her that she isn’t the only one who has lost something precious in this life.
It doesn’t take me long to find it.
But how do you talk to a ghost?
How do you comfort something—or someone—who isn’t really there?
His headstone is small and plain, like he was in life.
I stand in front of the stone and look down at it, feeling a lump form in my throat.
I take a deep breath and try to push away the memories of her face—the long black hair, the sunken eyes—and focus on the task at hand.
I’m here for a reason.
The last time I was here, I was a teenager.
I had just lost my father, and I was overwhelmed by grief and guilt.
I’m here to visit my father’s grave.
To say goodbye after all these years.
I left Vancouver as soon as I could, thinking that I could escape my past by moving far away from it.
To apologize for being a coward.
But the past has a way of catching up with you.
I’ve been dreaming of La Llorona for years, and now she’s brought me back to this place, back to where it all began.
I’ve spent the last two weeks traveling from one town to another, trying to find the courage to come back home and face my fears.
It wasn’t easy, but it was something I had to do.
It’s raining lightly now, and I close my eyes and let the drops fall on my face.
My entire life, I’ve been running away from the things that scare me, and it hasn’t helped one bit.
The water is cool and refreshing, but it can’t wash away the heat that’s burning inside me.
I’m so angry at myself for leaving my mother behind.
No matter how far you run, your demons will always catch up with you eventually.
And La Llorona—I don’t know if she’s my mother in disguise or just a figment of my imagination—has caught up with me at last.
If I had stayed, maybe things would have been different.
Maybe she wouldn’t have…
She won’t let me forget her, no matter how hard I try.
But it’s no use thinking about what might have been.
But why is she haunting me?
What does she want?
It’s too late for that now.
What did she want from my mother and father all those years ago?
The city is getting drenched in a downpour, but I don’t feel the cold anymore.
It’s not just the rain that’s making me shiver.
And, more importantly, what is she going to do to me now that I’m back in Vancouver?
For some reason, these questions make me feel more helpless than I’ve ever felt before in my entire life.
It’s knowing that I’m here, standing in front of my father’s grave, and that soon I’ll be seeing my mother again too.
She died a few years after he did, but she never really left me.
But I can’t let feelings stand in the way of what needs to be done.
The rain falls harder now, and it washes away all the dirt and grime on my clothes, on my skin, on my soul.
She’s been with me all this time, in my memories and in my dreams.
There are things about my past—about La Llorona—that I don’t want to remember, but I can’t forget them either.
And now she’s brought me back to Vancouver so that I can finally say goodbye.
Not even if I tried.
When I left this city ten years ago, I thought I was leaving everything behind.
But the truth is that I’ve been carrying it with me all this time, like a heavy weight on my shoulders.
I know that now.
So I’ll stand here in the rain, and I’ll let it wash away everything that needs to be washed away, and I’ll make a promise to myself that I’ll never run away again—not from La Llorona or anything else life throws my way.
I can still hear La Llorona crying in the distance, her voice echoing through the trees like a siren’s song.
She’s been calling to me for years, but I haven’t had the courage to answer her.
This is where things change for me.
It’s time to confront her and find out what she wants from me.
This is where I stop being a victim of circumstance and start taking control of my own life once more.
I kneel down in front of my father’s grave and close my eyes, remembering everything that happened that fateful night so long ago.
This is where I take my first step toward understanding the family curse that’s been following me—haunting me—for as long as I can remember.
The memories are still fresh in my mind, like an open wound that never heals.
My heart pounds in my chest as I think about what I did, and what happened after that.
I am twenty-eight now.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for what happened.
But maybe, if I confront it head-on, I’ll be able to move on, once and for all.
I can hardly believe it.
As I sit there in the rain, clinging to the past, I know that it’s not going to be easy.
The last ten years have passed in a blur.
There are things about that night that I still don’t understand, secrets that are buried deep in the ground along with my parents’ bodies.
I’ve been running for so long that it’s hard to remember what I was running from in the first place.
The memory of my mother’s face is starting to fade in the same way that an old photograph fades over time.
It’s not like I ever wanted to forget her.
For as long as I can remember she’s been the only one who really cared about me.
The only one who understood me.
But she’s gone now.
And I have to accept it.
It’s not easy, though.
Not at all.
Maria was only twenty-three when she died.
I’d just turned eight a month earlier.
She was the only one home that night, and I can’t help thinking that maybe if I’d been there with her she wouldn’t have been so alone and scared.
But I wasn’t there, and she was.
And she died.
My mother was born and raised in a small town in northern Mexico.
She was only sixteen when she met and fell in love with my father.
She moved here to Vancouver with him when they got married, leaving her entire family behind.
It took her years to accept it—to get used to it—but eventually she did.
It wasn’t easy for her, though.
As much as she loved my father—and she did love him very much—it wasn’t easy for her to be so far away from the people she’d spent her entire life with.
I remember her crying sometimes when she talked to her sister on the phone, but she never went back home—not even once.
She said it was because she didn’t want to leave me here all alone with Dad, and I’ll always be grateful for that.
Maria had many endearing qualities—she was funny, and smart, and beautiful—but the thing I loved most about her was her voice.
She had a way of speaking, almost like she was singing to you—no matter what she said or how mad she was when she said it—that made you feel happy and safe and loved.
I smile when I remember it, and then I realize that it’s been so long since I heard her voice that I can’t remember what it sounds like anymore.
My heart feels like it’s being squeezed by an invisible hand, and I can hardly breathe as I try to think of something—anything—that will help me remember her voice, but it’s no use.
I can’t remember it at all, and that makes my heart hurt more than anything else in the world ever could.
As I walk through the cemetery, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to remember what my mother’s voice sounded like, but then I realize that it doesn’t matter anymore because there’s something else I’ll always remember about her—something else that’s just as important: the lullaby that we sang together every night before we went to sleep, no matter where we were or how tired we were after a long day of work and school and taking care of the house.
When Maria died, I thought that was the end of our lullabies, but it wasn’t.