In The Dead of the Night

12 | starlit night

That night I had my first dream. Like the daydreams I too often slipped into during the daytime, it was him. But for once, it was him and me. Until it wasn't.

My feet swayed in the summer breeze, the laces to the red sneakers that I for some strange reason was wearing instead of the combat boots I fell asleep with unlaced and blowing freely in the wind. It was clearly summer; somehow, I could feel the warmth and the slight humidity of the air. I wondered if this was what dreams have been all along, only a slight fantasy, a small change, to something that was very much real.

I was somewhere where I'd never been before, some of the cities I'd been in were quite old-fashioned, but none were made up of only red brick buildings under 3 stories and low, rusting cars that drove freely because there wasn't a traffic light in sight. There were radio towers in the distance. The building I sat on must've been the tallest in the town.

I heard familiar footsteps approach behind me, but didn't bother looking back. The sun lit the entire world golden, and I couldn't tell if it was evening or early morning.

The footsteps stopped and a boy sat down next to me. Feeling his arm go around my shoulders, I leaned further into his hold, because all it took was one warm touch for me to know without a doubt that it was the boy I cared for so dearly that was holding me close to him, watching the sky on the ledge of a rooftop with me. He said something that I couldn't understand, and I responded with something I also couldn't understand.

Then he kissed me, and the world went hazy. I realized I'd never seen what he looked like kissing me, so my vision once again was of the golden skyline, but the kiss was definite on my lips, as if I could take it off and freeze it in this moment in time.

When I pulled away from him, the world became more clear again. I looked at him, and he smiled, the sweet, soft smile I didn't need to see many times to memorize. We kissed again, but instead of the hazy gold and maroon I'd seen before, my vision went dark, like night.

I pulled away from him, but my vision was still black. A strange feeling took over my body, an abnormal being, an uncanny iciness in my chest. The air, although I could swear it was still August, was filled with a sudden cold.

As I stood to my feet, the sound of low and heavy voices became more prominent. It was a sound that made my skin crawl with flashbacks I had tried to leave behind and disgust that was like spiders in my stomach, even before the sounds of two bronze daggers scraping against each other joined the chorus something felt terribly wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong.

I thought it began raining when my hands suddenly felt wet again. I stretched my hand out to the right to feel the warm droplets on the rest of my freezing skin, but after waiting a few moments, I realized the droplets only came down in a small circle that was now somewhere around my red sneakers, bouncing off the floor and onto my ankles. Everything was uncannily warm, and I wondered how a cloud had gotten into my darkness, and, at that, how it rained such warm droplets in a tiny circle like it did.

Only then did I look down at the puddle gathering around my ankles.

I'd never run so quickly. I could only differentiate three colors at that moment in time: black, white, and blood red. When I looked up and behind me, I could finally see the blood soaking through the perfect white ceiling. I ran faster until I reached the edge of the earth and fell like a fool down an infinite abyss.

I woke freezing cold and covered in a thin layer of sweat. I could barely comprehend the fat that I'd just had a real night dream, only the facts that this was nothing similar to a dream and very much a nightmare, the words that the first familiar low voice whispered were, 'For this moment, and every moment forward,', and that I never wanted to sleep again.