Collateral Damage

2) With a Sense of Poise and Rationality...

okay, so I was going to upload much earlier in the week, but a load of things got in the way - um, so, long story short, here's the next chapter! :)

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          With a Sense of Poise and Rationality...

I awoke with a gasp, jerking out of sleep. If I closed my eyes, I could still see his faint outline against the darkness of my lids. There, hold that image.

   But then he was gone again, as if he didn’t want to be remembered.

   I gathered the sheets around me and burrowed into them, trying to remember. I wanted the familiarity of his face, his demeanour, his voice. The chilling familiarity that was somewhat comforting.

   It was more than anyone else could do for me.

   I spent the remainder of the night restless, waking often and sleeping in jarring fits. I woke early, not trusting myself to sleep through the larger hours of the morning. I walked around my house in a daze; it was far too early to get dressed or have breakfast, yet I now felt too alive to fall back into slumber.

   I lived in the house on my own; it was the last house on Haberdasher Avenue, the biggest and the most haunting. It was a Rubix cube of the housing world. No part of the house matched any other part. One wall was brick, the jutting roofs on the attic windows were tiled with red slates, the back wall was half layered with white wood, and another part of a wall was white pebbledash. The windows were scattered about the house, never matching, all a different shade of dirty white or cream or black or green. A lone spire stuck out from the side of the house, supported by wooden beams. It looked like a strange, cylindrical creature trying to cling onto my home.

   The interior was just as complex; every room was connected, either by a corridor, a doorway or sometimes a cupboard that had a door on the front and the back. To a group of extroverted, hyperactive five year olds, it would have been a hide-and-seek heaven.

   I kitchen was light and cool as I stepped in; the cold tiles stung my bare feet. I’d forgotten to close the blind the evening before and so the marble surfaces glinted with the weak morning sun that streamed in through the window.

   I ran myself a glass of water, but I didn’t drink it. I wasn’t thirsty, but I didn’t know what to do with myself. The overwhelming feeling of familiarity in my chest was all-consuming. It sat side-by-side with another, unnameable feeling that threatened to swell and engulf my sense of poise and rationality.

   I took my glass of water to the conservatory and sat with my knees curled up by my chin in the wicker chair. I closed my eyes, still clutching the glass to my chest, as if to tangibly remind myself of what was real and what wasn’t.

   I felt instinctively as if I knew the man from somewhere. They say a person never dreams of strangers; every person in someone’s dream is someone they’ve met before, either fleetingly or enduringly. But this fact alone is not enough. My mind knew that I did not know the person in my dreams, but my heart still felt that pang of recognition in the way his gaze drove through my soul like a drill or the way he arrogantly raised an eyebrow at me, knowing he’d played the right card.

   Only it was the same card he played every single night.

   And I fell for it, every single night.

   The dream always ended as he was handing me a golden coin, as I was giving in and falling for his tales, spun like yarn around me.

   I was jolted awake by the sound of the oven alarm ringing out its tune. Every morning, seven-thirty, to remind me to get a move on. The water jogged in my hand and I split it over my arm.

   Sighing, I emptied the water into the kitchen sink and turned the alarm off. I set myself into motion, breakfasting, dressing and washing in a mindless daze that had become my hallmark amongst my peers.