"Peek a boo!

Who are you?

Well, I hope I am true,

It's my destiny,

To be with you..."

Shiva couldn't understand what was happening to him. The voice echoed everywhere. His surroundings started to rotate. Was it his freaking head or was this real?

Regardless he had his Cotard's Syndrome*. Was he dead?

He wasn't dead and so Cotard wasn't here. He had to fight it alone. Whatever it was, it was something.

Suddenly he woke up. Gosh! He was sleeping. Yeah, and dreaming. But it was the same dream which feared him since childhood. Every time he saw this he used to die. Well temporarily!

His heart used to stop in intense situations- a classic symptom of Cotard's syndrome.

But this time he felt it, to be real. He couldn't imagine the horror he used to face for so many years.

Shiva was a very different boy. He was sixteen and used to study in a boarding school. He had that typical introvert nature which prevented him to socialise with others. One couldn't say if he was happy or sad. He always had that neutral look in his face. It wasn't his horror that made his thoughts occupied in a place inside his brain, rather it was because he used to suffer from the walking corpse syndrome, also known as the Cotard's Syndrome. An ultra-rare psychological disease, which was a curse to have, but a gift he believed it to be.

Still, this was a question which couldn't be answered clearly.

Shiva had little people in this world whom he thought to be his own. One was his mother and second, was his childhood friend, Saige. These were the only people in the world whom he shared just twenty per cent of his feelings. The only people with whom he used to talk, spend time and only they knew about his psychiatric disease.

...

*Cotard's delusion, also known as walking corpse syndrome or Cotard's syndrome, is a rare mental disorder in which the affected person holds the delusional belief that they are dead, do not exist, are petrifying, or have lost their blood or internal organs. Statistical analysis of a hundred-patient cohort indicated that denial of self-existence is present in 45% of the cases of Cotard's syndrome; the other 55% of the patients presented with delusions of immortality.

In 1880, the neurologist Jules Cotard described the condition as Le délire des négations ("The Delirium of Negation"), a psychiatric syndrome of varied severity. A mild case is characterized by despair and self-loathing, while a severe case is characterized by intense delusions of negation and chronic psychiatric depression.

From <Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia>

This story is potraying this disease in a fictional manner. Please don't take the facts mentioned here to be completely true.

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