The Walking Dead

By Tim Sheng

           I have never seen a witch in real life, but I know she is there, lurking in the darkness. She attacks people with her wicked magic when they are most vulnerable. Under her spells, people lose their vitality and and are turned into the walking dead.

         When I heard the news about Kane Li, I knew the witch had committed another crime, this time on a person who was so close to me. Kane was a big, sturdy guy who could probably fight a beast in the woods with his bare hands, yet he didn’t manage to escape the clutches of witch’s dark magic.

        “Just trying to get back my real life.” This was Kane’s last Facebook update before he reached the roof of the building. Nobody would ever know Kane’s feelings at that moment, but I guessed he could no longer tolerate the cursed life of being a walking dead. He wanted to be a human again.

        Kane’s tragedy reminded me of my own confrontation with the witch in the winter of my sophomore year, when the combination of homesickness, miserable weather, and a heavy workload hit me hard. On those cold mornings, I woke up in exhaustion at 6:00 a.m. to the alarm clock. For a moment, my memory was temporarily wiped out. I didn’t know where I was, what time it was, or even how old I was. Then I looked around and was shocked to find myself in a tiny, secluded room with white walls, 10,000 km away from my birthplace. On my desk were stacks of assignments written in a foreign language that were going to be due in two hours. With my memories gradually restored, I started another exhausting day.
         On those nights, I was having a recurring dream. In the dream I was at home sitting comfortably next to the fireplace and having casual conversions with my parents. Out of the windows the wind screamed in a high pitch, and the snow particles danced fanatically in the air. I looked at those snow particles, and a sense of fear kicked in. Then all of a sudden, the fireplace vanished, my parents disappeared, and the whole structure of my house was gone, leaving me alone standing in the middle of a blizzard. Indeed, every day I felt like being trapped in this blizzard, having nowhere to run under the witch’s magic.

 Sometimes I tried to fight back. I tried to alleviate my homesickness by calling my friends back at home. Yet every time after listening to my friends' happy stories, I only envied them more and felt worse about myself. Gradually I lost the motivation to call them, realizing that they couldn’t just magically appear and save me from the spells I was under. I was in pain at first, full of regrets and grief about my current state. However, the pain gradually became numb, as I realized that the spell not only prevented me from feeling happy but also removed my ability to feel sad, like a soulless zombie. The wicked witch had turned me into a walking dead person who could neither feel nor think. With my emotions paralyzed, I carried out my daily routines with very little interaction with the world around me.

         Now when I looked back to those days, I am still scared. At that time, the witch was consuming me, little by little without my realization. I never knew how close exactly I was to the irrational edge. Luckily, the combination of medicine and time brought me back to the human state. Back from the spring break, when the snow melted and the river thawed, the hot, fresh blood was flowing in my body again. The witch conceded her defeat as her zombie spells on me had expired. Yet we have to remain cautious, since the witch can come back at any time. So the battle goes on: either we shall fight and slay the wicked witch, or her spells will one day consume us.