Spider Web Nightmares, or Dreamwalking

            Tendrils stretch across the chasm, nearly invisible in the dusk.

I am invisible or I am present or they cannot see me or know me. I take and take and take but they do not know how much I give or how far I have been spread, thrown, cast aside. They used to know but now not even I know how I was caught in this net I only know that I am here. I am here.

Sometimes the bed is not made, crumpled and thrown by uncaring hands. Othertimes it is pristinely tucked and folded, as if no one had slept in it at all. But I know that's not true, I hold the proof of it in my hands.

Murmurs of metaphors and mirages and moments that cannot be real and yet are. They fill me up, break me apart, make me into whole separate beings.

Feathers flutter as my fingers fall.

I whisper away, the breath of fresh air that sighs into the empty room my only evidence.

Will anyone dare to invoke my name?

I am composed of images, wavering in the dim light of early dawn. Images or thoughts or memories or imaginings, I cannot tell the difference because to me they are all the same and they are all bad bad bad.

If you pick me up and throw me I will shatter or thump or vanish with only the faintest scream on the air to remember me by. Well, that and the abundance of nightmares they are no longer protected from, harassing them nightly and accusing them of letting me break apart. Accusing them of selfishly sewing me back together, a patchwork guardian that is in it's own hell.

Ever so rarely I stumble upon that moment between waking and sleep where eyelids flutter and soft mewls escape and the last remnants of a dream are chased up and up and up, until they twist, coil, and are finally snared.

Catching them is the easy part.

Instinct driven, the spider weaves its way toward the center.

What happens when dreamcatchers are full? Who empties them? It is, I believe I doubt I know, me. The one who sees the darkness, dances with nightmares, does not deserve the torment.

I am used to this solitary existence. It would not be right, I think, to share this with another. At one time I minded specific children and saw what plagued them and felt stuttering pride over saving them from themselves, but now I try to escape from it all because they have outgrown me and I cannot last last, I am the last. I am the only. I am what I do not know.

They blur together and they blur with me and eventually possibly hopefully I can blur away from it all altogether. I am alone yet I am built from the fragments of the infinitesimal imperative fate-makers. Their fate is to be reborn and carry on and create something that will last longer than I will. I have outlasted everything so far, if I don't count the times I myself was reborn because I bent and stretched and snapped and somehow found my pieces again.

Damn the children.

I am invisible, I am nothing. I am all that they make me because it is not good enough for them or they are not good enough for it.

If I am my experiences, why am I composed only of others and their harsh imaginings and what kind of existence is that?

I do not dream.

My name has been forgotten. Or perhaps it was never known. I have been shifting, shifting, shifting for so long I cannot remember. Sand sifts and shifts and I am become a nonbeing or an extrabeing as me myself I does not exist.