It was a dark night.
But there was something in the sky.
I looked out- a strange glowy object riding the sky, drifting slowly towards me as if it knew exactly where I was.
For years, the night had been my enemy. It was when the memories came. Not memories like photographs, clear and still. Mine came like broken glass, flashes of slammed doors, footsteps in the hallway, hands grabbing, voices sharp enough to cut. Sometimes the sound of a chair scraping across the floor would send me spiralling, heart pounding so fast it felt like I was choking on air.
PTSD, they called it. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. A name that sounded too clean for the mess inside my head.
I really didn’t know who I was anymore. Each new foster home wanted me to be someone different- polite, grateful, “a good kid.” But how could I be any of those things when most nights I woke up shaking, certain I was back in places I’d fought so hard to leave behind? I told myself I was just a label- orphan, broken, damaged. It was easier that way. If I was nothing, no one could expect anything from me.
But then came the light.
At first, I thought it was another hallucination, the kind that sometimes clawed out of my nightmares and blended into waking life. It was steady, alive. The glowing object glided closer until I could see, no, feel that it wasn’t just light. It was a carriage made of glass and memory, pulled by creatures with wings woven from starlight. It stopped outside my window- patient, waiting.
I whispered, “Not me. You’ve got the wrong kid. I’m not… I’m not worth finding.”
But the door opened anyway.
Inside, it was worse than I feared. My past spilled into the air like smoke: the orphanage room with peeling paint, the foster house where I hid under the bed while people screamed above me, the night I was told I’d be moving again, and again, and again. Each fragment felt too real. I couldn’t breathe. My chest locked up, my vision blurred, my body curled in on itself as panic took over.
“I can’t,” I gasped, clutching at my head. My whole body shook, trembling the way it always did when the flashbacks got too close.
And then the carriage slowed. The light didn’t erase the memories, it held them still, so I could see. Not as monsters, not as weapons, but as truths.
The orphanage: I saw myself- smaller, clutching a crumpled paper star I’d made in art class. I remembered how much hope had folded into it, even when no one noticed. The foster homes: I remembered the smell of cinnamon one woman used when she baked, and how, just once, she tucked a blanket around me when I had a fever. The nights under the bed: yes, there was shouting, yes, I was terrified, but the sound I kept hearing was my own heartbeat. Relentless and alive. Refusing to stop.
The memories didn’t vanish. But for the first time, they didn’t own me.
I broke right then, sobbing harder than I ever had. All the years of the silence, all the swallowed pain I had kept, came rushing out. My hands shook, my breath stuttered, but the light wrapped around me, steady and warm. It didn’t demand I stop. It didn’t demand I be “better.” It simply held me.
And in that glow, the voice came, not loud, not forceful, but certain.
“You are not what happened to you. You are not the fear that lives inside your chest. You are not only the pain you carry. You are the child who survived. The one who is still here.”
The words sank into me like water into dry soil. For so long, I thought my identity was nothing but scars. That I was just the victim card, shuffled from hand to hand. But now, under the wide mouth of the sky, I felt something shift. I was more than the panic, more than the files with my name on them.
I was still here. Broken, maybe. But breathing.
When the carriage brought me back to my room, the glow settled into my chest, faint but real. I still shook. I still hurt. I knew the flashbacks would return. But something had changed. I wasn’t just surviving anymore, I was beginning to remember myself.
That night, the stars outside burned brighter than I’d ever seen. And for the first time, I believed them.
Because the sky hadn’t forgotten me.
And neither had I.
Writer : Eva Jain
Grade : 10 (Year 2026)
Place : Virginia, USA
