Dreaming Of Something That Makes Sense

It was a dream that I'd never had before.

While there are a great many things that I am given to dream of, the future is never one of them. I don't like the idea of taking a chance with that. Dreaming of what might be only builds up expectations that are inevitably shattered into pieces.

But in the dark I dreamed about my future.

Everything was vivid and everything was boring. I lived a life of routine as if I thought that waking up at the same time every day and going to the same job and sitting behind the same desk made up for a complete lack of any other kind of accomplishment. I could describe, could painstakingly recreate, every inch of every room that I spent my every day in because none of it ever changed.

No wonder I'd dreamed of wanting a second chance.

Shake my head and shake off the feeling. No this was the dream. I wasn't back in time I was sitting in my apartment. I had that job and I had that life and I had the lie to keep me company. I didn't need my second chance, not after all those years of convincing myself that I was happy enough as is.

It was all folly, none of what I'd imagined after the bar made any kind of sense at all. The fair that was a perfect remake of the one I'd gone to as a child. The woman in the tent who promised me something that no one could give. None of that could be real, even the memory of it had the hazy insubstantiality of a dream. The smoke in her tent was the clearest indicator, shifting the world through it like a veil that hid the truth away.

I was me. I would always be me. I would always be the result of every choice that I'd made up until this point and I would always remain immutable.

Second chances didn't happen, not in real life.

But did I want it? Certainly the offer was tempting but it would mean giving up on everything I'd accumulated and even if I didn't have much that didn't mean I didn't have anything at all. I had what I'd built up and losing all of that was frankly terrifying.

I was torn, here in the dark where my mind was starting to settle into sense. I put together the pieces of the evening in my mind’s eye and shuffled them into an order that was frankly the only order they could work in.

I woke up without even remembering that it was my birthday. I went to work and no one remembered me. When it was finally brought up to me I sought solace alone in a bar, only to have an unfortunate turn of events bring it back to slap me in the face as I watched that beautiful woman have the time of her life on her birthday while I wallowed on mine.

So I stumbled out of the bar, probably a little drunker than I'd expected. I wandered the familiar streets home, maybe stopping in an alleyway to lean against the wall as the world spun around me and my brain invented a different path than the one I went on.

It's all a psychological break. It's all senseless in that way. It’s all imagined.

I imagined that I walked through the fair and made a wish on a witches mirror but instead the truth is that I just walked home alone, shaking as I slid my key into the lock and stumbling over to my couch to collapse on it.

I'm shivering now, that's what the vibrations are around me. I'm tucked in close under a blanket and holding a pillow to me and that's why my body feels so different. I'm clenching my eyes shut and trying to fight off the nausea of the night’s events, not adjusting to a form that I've simultaneously never had and had all along.

The world shivers, it shudders. The mirror surface of reality shatters into a billion shards that shimmer in the singular point of light of this darkness and the pieces shift, orbiting around one another as they reform into a surface just as still and quiet but with all the pieces in all the wrong places.

I shift with it.

I feel the change.

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