Once in a blue moon

I've lost count of how many nights I've woken up feeling like I couldn't breathe. Feeling like my body can't get enough oxygen quickly enough. Every so often I find myself becoming increasingly short of breath over a long period of time, as if my brain was unable to command my lungs to start the ventilation process. Once in a blue moon the feeling strikes while I'm at rest. Once in a blue moon. Blue.

It came like a tsunami. The first time I met him was like a foreshock, settling in my heart like an earthquake does in the depths of the sea. Silent. So silent. But powerful enough to destroy a whole city. It shook my dreams, inadvertently starting to curse them as nightmares, just as the unusual behavior of the sea before a tsunami starts. Images of his blue eyes staring at me, of the world ending a long time ago, began to experience a change in meaning. I just didn't know what it meant at the time. I knew it was part of the trauma, and Adrien knew that. But they kept happening, over and over. Always of him, never the same dream twice, but the exact same feeling in each and every one of them.

The pressure in my chest was not caused by his hand on my throat. No. It's caused by the way the place felt when I first and last saw him, as if the atmosphere had somehow impregnated my body, becoming an uninvited guest that made it its home with no intention of leaving anytime soon. His hand on my throat holds me still, making it impossible to see anything other than his blue eyes. Blue. You can't scream. You just can't. You can't move. You wish you could move, but you just can't. And all your body is able to do is try to breathe. Adrien had learnt to know the meaning behind the way that I breathe. He knows when I'm heavily breathing on purpose so that he wakes me up from the blindness of my nightmares. He knows my nightmares have to do with him. He knows they break me everytime and I know it breaks him too.

I wish they wouldn't break him. I wish he didn't have to go through it every night with me. I wish he didn't have to witness how I'm unable to recognize him immediately upon waking up. How I refuse to look him in the eye when he calls me by my name. And how incredibly painful it is to fear him, even if just for a second, knowing that the man that's sleeping in the same bed as I am, right next to me, is the reason the world once ended.

It changes you. It really does. Slowly turning your mind into thoughts you wish weren't yours. Adrien never asks what I'm thinking. Not because he doesn't care, certainly not because he doesn't care. He just knows that I'm not ready and I can't help but worry that deep down it's because he already knows.

The thing about my nightmares is that they're not just a product of my imagination and I've come to believe for a while that that's the reason I can't make them stop. My nightmares are a product of an anomaly or transmutation my mind created of what we both lived, as if it somehow had its own metamorphosis process that results in him. They belong to memories created by an event that was real, that happened.

It's hard to wake up from a nightmare where you weren't even asleep to begin with.

We had our moments before we made the first conscious decision about what was going to happen. Moments of screaming at each other, in which we shouted and shouted, 'please, listen to me' without allowing ourselves to actually do it, on the verge of desperation trying so hard to understand the other but holding with all our being our need to first be understood.

"You're not listening to me, Adrien! You don't understand."

"You don't think I know that?! Damn right I don't understand! And, my God, Mari, I wish I did. You have no idea what I would give to swap my mind with yours, even for a second just so that I could give you a moment of peace, a moment where you didn't have to fear God-knows-what. Mari, I'm trying. But I don't know what to do. Please tell me what to do. Because I can't—"