My nightmares have mostly stopped.
I don't know if theirs have.
Everything convulses and buries me.
I snap up in bed like a mousetrap. I soon realize it never actually happened — at least to me, in real, waking life.
It did to them.
Many were buried alive. About 90,000 didn't survive.
Survivors awoke to a living nightmare every morning then. But some of their life dreams have since come true.
I spent about eight months in total making 15 journeys through the Wenchuan earthquake zone to chronicle Sichuan province's recovery after the 8.0-magnitude temblor unleashed its seismic violence on May 12, 2008.
Ten years ago, the Longmen Mountains slung off their stone skins to blast flash floods of rock that inundated those below. Tectonic vehemence simultaneously warped buildings into real-life M.C. Escher paintings.
Many people were interred.
Five of my birthdays were spent at the Cave of 10,000 Dead in Sichuan province's Yingxiu, since the date tends to fall around China's Tomb Sweeping Day.
Few experiences make you think about meaning like entering into another year of life surrounded by death. That is, while watching parents claw at the earth and scream at the sky, since their children will never celebrate another birthday.
Over the years, more of the women I met had babies after losing their only children. Now, these kids have birthdays.
Yu Zhengyin spent 20 hours fighting to survive after she was buried. She wanted to die once rescued since her legs were lost.
Yu learned to love life again.
Many people with spinal injuries wondered how they'd cope without walking.
They did.
Then, they told me, they wondered how they'd make love with their spouses.
Nobody among this group in Mianyang city, at least, divorced. Some say their relationships grew.
I recall driving into the mountains beyond the miles and miles of tents and rubble until these improvised settlements were replaced with miles and miles of landslides that eventually clogged the bone-clattering road.
We'd seen nothing for hours but the fan-shaped ejections of rock and sand that erupted from the mountaintops. Buildings' top floors sometimes poked out like periscopes with widows for lenses. Other buildings' bottom floors spat waterfalls from cliffs that had suddenly appeared.
We stepped out of the car.
Thickets of incense sticks commemorated those buried beneath like exclamation points punctuating their deaths.
Tiny green question marks wriggled in a puddle.
Tadpoles.
"Look," my colleague, a local, said. "Life."
We laughed. And cried.
That was shortly after I met Xue Chen.
I'd volunteered at his prefabricated middle school school half a year after the disaster.
He said his goal was to master English and become a tour guide to meet people from around the world and travel.
Today, he leads foreigners along the ancient Silk Road.
"I had a dream," he recently texted me.
"I studied and worked hard … I love my job."
He invited me to his wedding.
Indeed, his story is one of the nightmares of a decade ago that've turned into dreams come true today.
Photos provided by Erik Nilsson
About the author & broadcaster
Erik Nilsson is an American journalist who has worked in China for over 10 years. His work has won various honors, including the Chinese Government Friendship Award — the highest honor the country bestows on foreigners. He has traveled to every provincial-level jurisdiction except Chongqing, covering such stories as the Wenchuan and Yushu earthquakes, nomadic communities’ development and civil society.
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