This Isn't A Nightmare

I stood just in time. Just when I felt the chair start to give beneath me and just when I felt my balance shift to the ragged edge of falling I stood and got my feet beneath me on a ground I could not see as the world faded into smoke and darkness around me.

I closed my hands over my body and they passed through the dress I was wearing and fell touching on my own skin which was warm and soft and inviting and it made me want to close my eyes into the relaxation of it but I held out, watching until the last moment as the smoke drifted and took the last sense of what was real in this world and all that was left was dream slowly fading into oblivion.

Never in my life have I liked sleep. Never have I found a reason for it outside of mechanical necessity. It always felt like wasted time to me, a third of our lives spent in shutdown mode where we lie in darkness because darkness was all it ever was to me.

They say that dreams come to everyone but only a few remember them. They say you dream every night.

I haven’t dreamt in years. Can’t remember the last time I had a dream. Never really, maybe, even believed they were real.

But I believe in nightmares. Those I’ve had.

And as the darkness creeps in the fear comes with it. The worry that in this darkness, in this oblivion, something I don’t want will take hold of me. It will find me and drag me down into a pit that I will never get out of and I don’t want that.

I’ve had such a day. I don’t know if I can take that end.

Denial. Once more denial. Once more closing my eyes and pretending the world beyond it doesn’t exist and because this is a dream it’s easier to do maybe and I hold out on that. I hold onto it and grip onto it as I hold onto myself and feel my body beneath my touch and I remember.

All the feelings I’ve had today. All the things that have happened to me. The two days that I’ve been awake without real rest one in the life that I did live and one in this life instead and I shake my head wondering when I will get my peace and then I remember all the people who want to take it from me.

And all the people I want to give it to.

Emily Ross. So soft. So supple. So warm.

So needy beneath my touch and so eager to be with someone. Falling into the arms of one wrong person after another but unsure whether they are truly wrong and I wonder why I can’t make heads or tails of anything anymore and I know it.

It’s been so long since I had to make a decision that when I’m presented with a bevy of options I just give in to each and every one of them.

Or maybe it’s that each one of them is appealing like all the others. Maybe it’s that I want more than I can imagine because Emily wants but then Emily is me and I am her and it all doesn’t matter, does it?

The distinction between the two of us is truly irrelevant, isn’t it?

A spike driven between infinity. A string and a spirit and whatever other simile that want to use. Whatever other example for the same basic statement which is that I am Emily and she is me and we are we. Or I.

So I fell into Rachel and I gave myself to Blake. I went too far with Eddie and I begged Lucas for more.

And I would give anything to have any of them. To have hands on my body that didn’t belong to me and me alone. To have a little more, to feel everything I could.

This is a dream but I wish for it to be real and I don’t know how much control I have and the void isn’t feeling quite so empty anymore and I don’t know how I can know it but I feel the presence behind me and I don’t open my eyes as they step up to me.

As the hands of another join my own on my own body and I relax into them, feeling the warmth of another behind me as they wrap me up and their breath starts to play on my skin.

This isn’t a nightmare.

This is a fantasy.

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