I never thought I'd be the one to break the Multiverse. One minute I'm chillin' while having an identity crisis, minding my own business, then the universe says "YEET".
Now that it's apparently open season for emotional damage, things from my past a...
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I haven't dreamed since I was fifteen years old.
People have tried to argue with me about that. They say everybody dreams and I just don't remember mine.
I remembered the night it stopped. I'd been out with friends, having snuck out of our dorm rooms. Year nine of high school, I was just trying to my hardest to scrap by and pass all my class (which proved harder than I thought because I was also doing gymnastics and boxing at the same time), so I didn't get out my, but my best friend decided to go after a guy I didn't trust. A boy from the local public school I used to go to before the family decided that boarding-school worked better. I'd gone with her to make sure I didn't do anything stupid, and I was the one who paid.
It was your typical teenage blowout, like in the American movies. It could've given that Corey kid a run for his money.
There was a bonfire in the backyard. Music blasted so loud that I couldn't here myself think, and people danced in ways that I wish I didn't remember. I was touched in ways I never wanted to be again. The air smelled like smoke, both campfire and pot. There were too many people and too much noise. Like sound was attacking me. I had a couple drinks, ate a couple chips and cookies as I watched my friend jump through hoops to a guy to notice her.
I was half-asleep on the couch when it happened. I couldn't move. Couldn't scream. The blurry image of a boy in red lay next to me. I held his hand. It felt like someone was whacking me—both of us—with a metal pole, over and over and over again. The feeling lasted for hours as the party passed on around me.
It felt so real. Whoever the boy next to me was, he was inches from death long before he died. Then, halfway to sunrise, every nerve in my body set on fire all at once. Just as quickly as it started, it ended, and I woke up in a sweat.
I pushed it to the back of my mind for years, until I watched Under the Red Hood for the first time. I dismissed it as one of those prophetic dreams.
But now that I was here, I think I felt another version of me die.
This was something I didn't tell Tim.
He came over sometimes and we watched Supernatural or played Uno. We had to change to DND because it was getting too competitive.
"Buonanotte, Zio Ben!" I shouted, smiling slightly as I stepped out the door. I pulled my hood up, shivering due to the sharp breeze that passed through the street as I started my journey home. The cold reminded me that if I was still here by December, it would be my first white Christmas.
I reached my neighbourhood ten minutes later, not waiting for the light to change before crossing. Put me a hundred feet away from Chinese takeaway and I get tunnel vision. Across from my laundromat was a 24/7 dumpling place I frequented—Galaxy Bao. The purple neon stars and Milky Way lit up the doorway above me. It's the kind of place where you just know the food was good, the menu looked like it was made in Microsoft Word and all the picture of the food were slightly out of focus and still had the watermark on them. The first time I walked in, I saw the menu was the worst laminating I'd ever seen. I didn't know if it was just an Australian thing, but the dodgier it looked, the better the food is. Bonus points if the place has a vague connection to organised crime, and/or someone's underaged nephew working was working there.
