She didn’t understand why it happened, only that it never stopped. The doctors called it a “break from shared reality”. They gave it a name — one she stopped repeating after the third appointment because names made it feel real in a way she couldn’t survive.

It began with drawings that didn’t match memory. A chair she sketched appeared in her room the next morning, except it was slightly wrong. The legs were too long. The shadow pointed the wrong way.

She told herself she had simply forgotten. But the mistakes continued.

A window she drew opened into a wall that hadn’t been there before.

A bird she sketched tapped at her real window from inside the paper.

When she complained, her mother cried and insisted that nothing had changed at all. That was the first fracture: the world no longer agreed with her. The second came when her sketchbook went missing. She found it under her bed, open, its pages filling themselves with slow, careful strokes, like something was learning her hand.

She stopped drawing. The drawings didn’t stop her.

They appeared on their own now on mirrors, on skin, on the backs of her eyelids whenever she blinked too hard. The doctors increased her medication. They told her the “episodes” would pass. But one night, during a routine check-up, the nurse froze.

“There’s ink under your fingernails,” she whispered.

The girl looked down. She hadn’t drawn anything in weeks. Then the lights in the room flickered. And on the white hospital wall, a new sketch began forming from nothing at all:

A bed.

A nurse.

And a girl inside it, watching herself wake up.

Author: Anika Bajaj, 12 years old