The Book Nook

3

  Alexandria sometimes wakes in the middle hours of the night, bolting upright into a sitting position. It jolts me out of my own sleep and, for as many times as it has happened, it still sends my heart racing no differently than opening your closet to find somebody standing there in a face-mask. Seeing her just sitting there, back straight with sheets pulled up and scrunched around her waist, her bare arms visibly breaking out in gooseflesh. I ask her what it is that's wrong and she never responds right away, she just stares straight ahead as if watching something still playing out before her eyes somewhere in the lost realms between sleep and awakening, unseen to regular, unmagical folks like me.

   Her dreams are regularly very vivid, as she tells me, some strange variation of what they call dreaming lucidly. I've read up (books upon books) on the subject because of Alexandria's sensitivity to this phenomenon mixed with my urge to understand the things she goes through that she declines to speak about. She doesn't know I've been reading books about such subjects. I've never mentioned it to her. Would she appreciate my efforts? Would she tell me that I just couldn't understand? That I wouldn't understand because I wasn't living those dreams? It seemed that when I did things like that - put such eager efforts into understanding her more, trying to pull back the layers of her complexity - it almost made her draw back from me, like my intensity was only scaring her.

   "Scaring isn't the right term for it," she most adamantly assured me after I said all this to her one day. "Rather it's....an internal flaw. One that I'm trying to break free from."

   And with my help, she says to me, it's the only way she'll ever be able to do so. I do believe her. Even if my attempts to penetrate that outer layer shell that she has always kept herself so tightly inside of were blocked by some protective coating, one that safely hid her vulnerabilities and fragilities, closed her off to others, even those closest to her as I was. Perhaps it was enough for her to know I understood this, understood her. Maybe that gave her the assurance she needed.

   When she awakens at those points in the middle of the night and I feel the quick movement of her sitting up in the bed, I don't say anything. I slowly sit up and just put my arms around her and I hold her. I hold her until the trembling stops or until she finally relaxes her body from a frozen stiffness.

   The most recent instant occurred only a short time ago when she awoke from another such dream. She was scared this time, more frightened than I've seen in a long time. Her body was shaking all over and holding her did nothing. She was still in some half-in/half-out state of consciousness, murmuring under breath. I know that when she fully wakens, the first thing she does is put pen to paper in her dream journal that sits on the nightstand next to her edge of the bed. Sometimes when she does this, I hear her talking to herself as if telling the story of the dream aloud will keep the memory from disappearing. This time, though, she did not relax, shift over to the side of the bed and reach for the journal. She stayed exquisitely still like an actor pretending that time had stopped.

   Alexandria records her dreams. Those records in a book become another outlet for pouring out of herself the things that are on her mind or in her heart. I've never seen them, those dream recountings. She gets shy when talking about them, and Alexandria never gets shy about anything. She says that she learns from them and is continuously learning.

   Sometimes I tease her for speaking in such riddles all the time.

   I could feel something in the folds between the seen and the unseen was changing, shifting. And I was a part of it just as much as Alex was a part of it.

   After what had to have been almost twenty minutes, she finally relaxed, I could feel her rigidity cease and she touched my left arm that was around her waist, folding her fingers through mine and giving the smallest of squeezes as if saying to me that it's all right now, it's over.