Can I Go Back?

I sensed my time with her coming to an end. I sensed a looming void of questions behind me half of which I couldn’t ask because I didn’t want to or wasn’t ready to know the answers and the other half were all tangled up in thoughts I’d only begun to have so I didn’t know how to spit them out.

“How do I go home?” I asked her instead, not knowing if it was truly what I wanted an answer to.

“You want to leave?” she said and at the same time another voice that may have come from her or from me spoke over her, saying “You are home.”

Untangling the confusion in my mind I closed my eyes and shook my head, feeling worse afterwards like all it had done was tangle me up in the cobwebs.

“How do I go back then?” I corrected, “Can I even go back?”

“Back to who you used to be? Back to the life you left behind? The one you hated? The one you were alone in? The one you wanted to leave?”

I ignored all those statements because they were inconvenient. I pushed forward with insistence, wanting an answer.

“Can I even go back?”

She nodded, her face a mask of inconsistent emotions and entirely unable to be read. She steepled her fingers and stared at me above them, her eyes narrowing as if she was looking inside of me.

“It’s possible,” she told me, “What was done is not forever if it need not be. I can gesture and you can walk through the door, just like you did before.”

“So do it,” I said, before I lost my nerve, “Send me…”

My voice trailed away and honestly I was shocked that I’d even been able to say it in the first place. I couldn’t believe that I’d found it in me to put it into words because right now every inch of my body was strained to the breaking point, urging me into silence.

Before I said something I regretted.

“I can’t,” she told me.

“You just said-“

“Not here,” she explained, “This is a dream, after all.”

No, that wasn’t… that wasn’t what she said before, “But you said it was real, right?”

I couldn’t be certain. I couldn’t remember. Everything was staring to get hazy and inconsistent just like the dress around me. It was all turning into wisps again and I reached forward towards the desk to grip the edge and feel something solid but my hands passed through it, closing onto nothing.

“I didn’t,” she corrected me, “I said nothing of the sort. I didn’t even say that I am real.”

“So are you?”

She nodded, “I am. My spirit and my soul but not my body, no more real than this tent around you.”

Holding up a hand I watched her wave it and as she did the fingers turned to wispy smoke before my eyes. The whole air was filled with it now, enough that it made my eyes prickle and burn.

“You can send me back,” I insisted, “You can make me, me again.”

She nodded.

“How?” I said urgently, sensing everything slipping away moment by moment.

But she didn’t have the same urgency I did. She lingered, moving at a snails pace and unwilling to push herself that little bit more.

And as she spoke I saw why. Even the vibrations of her voice were breaking her apart, shuddering her into nothing but wispy memories.

“Find me,” she said, “Ask me. In the real world, or real as it gets at least.”

“Where?” I said, hands drawing to my body and closing over myself protectively, “Where are you?”

But she didn’t say, she only smiled.

So I asked instead, “What happens next? What happens now?”

“You’re sleeping,” she told me, her final words, “What always happens. You dream.”

And then she slid away, falling from me and fading into the wispy inconsistency around her.

For a limited time you can join my Patreon for only $2 and get access to over a month's worth of new pages of My Second Chance as well as SEVEN FULL STORIES with a new one every month! Join here: https://www.patreon.com/SophiePert