A dream. The very same dream—the one that comes in patterns of weeks, of months. The one that haunts, that scrapes at the corners of my sanity in hopes of peeling it upward to reveal what is beneath, as if I am only held together by cheap adhesive ( and perhaps I am ). The one that can only be outrun by collapsing from exhaustion and bypassing dreams entirely. Tonight starts my vigil, so I suppose I will find plenty of time to write between the sun’s fall and rise.
The dream itself was not much different than usual. I have recorded it before and will likely continue to do so, as it lurks beyond that black silk curtain draped around the walls of my skull. Gnarled hands claw their way beneath a material all too flimsy to keep them at bay, dragging themselves and, of course, the body that belongs to them, to the forefront of my musings. Where there should be walls to contain such behemoths, there is only silk.
Though the layout of my mind is irrelevant when it is something so intangible, I suppose. Describing it as though it is a physical location seems a bit ludicrous, even to myself.
About the dream: I am standing, staring at my visage in a mirror. Naturally, I do not know how I’ve arrived at this location, nor do I remember precisely how long I have been observing myself. My face appears as it should have, had I not been branded as a child, and for a long moment I do not recognize myself. The skin surrounding my right eye paints an angry cardinal, and much in the way that seared skin tends to do, peels away rather gruesomely, allowing ink to roll along my skin in place of blood. The contrast should be jarring, but I am left completely underwhelmed. I cannot help but suppose it is fitting that a blackened heart would taint the veins and their contents as well.
I make the mistake of blinking.
The mirror glitches, and I realize all too late that it is not a mirror at all. I should have known, however, because I am not smiling, nor am I tilting my head, nor am I laughing, but he is. He begins to appear less opaque than before somehow; a thought projection, my diluted memories supply, though one with a mind of its own. One with a name, a story, a motive—all of which are hard to remember through the body of water which separates me from clear, concise recollections.
My hand lifts. Restrospectively, I do not remember giving it the command to do so, but it lifts all the same. I feel the energy coursing through my fingers along with the burning, aching, agonizing wish to expel this false version of myself. It is a motion so familiar, almost second nature in some way, and so I do not think before I give in. It lulls me, the hum of magic through my bones, into a docile vessel. I realize a moment too late that my mouth is forming words. They echo; my voice, too loud, repeating something cruel and soaked in malice back to me. All else is silent.
‘Altairis,’ ricochets off of the walls. It repeats, and it repeats, and it repeats, and when the smoke clears, I have not defeated myself as I struggle to think that I had originally intended. Had that been the intention? It is all so unclear.
Three bodies. All dead, surely. All by my hand. The first, a friend I have not seen since before I blinked and was eight years older, standing in a crystalline tower with hands a bleeding red. The second, a soul unknown to me who was brought into a fight that was far from their own.
The last, a love. My love, more specifically, and for a moment I can do nothing more than stare. I stare because I cannot agree with the image in front of my eyes; these people cannot be here, cannot be dead, when a moment prior I was staring at myself. I stare because the breath in my lungs has died and I have forgotten how to inhale. I stare because the silence is so definite, so crisp, so potent, that it is disorienting. It is far too quiescent to be inhabited by death; I am far too calm, too composed, too collected.
‘It’s okay,’ she says—my love, I mean. Her voice is soothing, entirely too soothing, and her bloodied head lifts from the ground, propped up leisurely by a twisted, snapped arm. For a moment I cannot tell where her hair ends and where her blood begins. Her eyes are open, dull, lifeless already, and her sunshine-smile stretches to lengths I cannot rationalize to be anatomically plausible. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she assures. ‘Look.’
My head turns to accommodate the strings tied at my wrists. They are so thin, so flimsy—I hadn’t even noticed that they were there.
‘It wasn’t you, not really,’ she promises. Her voice feels like a palm stroking my cheek, like fingers carding through my hair, like the gentle cradle of someone madly in love. It feels wrong.
It’s strange, I think, because it surely looked like me, it felt like me—I can remember the motions clearly, I can remember the words and the way they tasted leaving my mouth.
And that is when the glass beneath my feet breaks. Not literally, in this sense, but it is the moment of realization. That is when the staring in silence is no longer staring, and it is no longer silent, and instead the strings have snapped and I am falling to my knees. I hear nothing through the white noise, but I am sure that I am screaming because my throat is raw. I am sure that I am crying because my face is warm. I am sure that I am dying because water, or blood, or ink, is filling my throat, my lungs, and I am choking. I cannot breathe. And I do not want to breathe.
‘Don’t you see that it was not your fault?’
The strings were too frail to have pulled me along. Had I resisted, had I done anything at all, things would not have ended this way. You would be alive. You would all be alive.
And maybe I would be dead instead.
