One Ticket to Fill a Lacuna

Chapter 1 || The Dream

Hey! Since this is the first chapter feel free to provide as much input as you want! All comments are appreciated, and I'm always looking to improve! Otherwise, I hope you enjoy! (: Btw, I'm Alex. I'm going to attempt the Chapter a Day October with this book, so I can finish it and be consistent. <3

Chapter 1:

The world whirled around and blurred colors painted my vision as he spun me around again and again. Gleeful laughs echoed endlessly throughout the air and a hearty chuckle coming from above rained down on me. His callused fingers were rough against my silky smooth china doll skin, and I held onto him tightly. I looked up and saw a smile that was muffled through my dizziness and a vibrant blue sky above.

My small sandaled foot brushed the long wisps of uncut grass on the ground so close under me and I giggled with delight at the small sensation of tickling that the grass left on the nerves under my foot. The callused fingers I was gripping began to slide away from me and I made frantic grasps to hold on, laughing all the while. I had nothing to worry about, after all. He would always be there for me. He would never let me go.

Nevertheless, the fingers got increasingly harder to grab. An unsettling fog covered the previously neon sky, making it murky and disguising the sun's rays. Small rocks pelted my bare toes as my feet got closer and closer to the ground. The soft grass was no longer there. I whimpered slightly and tried one last time to clutch onto the comfortable hands that were previously holding mine.

I was falling, but the ground wasn't coming. There was no impact. There was just the darkness surrounding me as I fell continuously. Across my vision widened a white smile, one that I recognized as his. Tears rolled down my puffy cheeks, though I wasn't conscious of it, and so I mimicked the smile prevailing in front of me, not knowing that I was in fact miserable. The huge smile shrunk and came closer to me, now with teeth like thousands of sharpened fork prongs. I squealed and lashed around, all while still falling through nothingness.

The resistance of my surroundings against my flailing became stronger and stronger. It was suffocating, and silently painful, like a slowed down process of paralysis. Soon I was no longer falling, but simply suspended in air, and a small light appeared far away, and then quickly disappeared, like a tiny door opening and closing. Through the thick blackness I could see a hazily glowing figure approaching. It was him. He got closer and closer, and held out his hand.

"Do you want to spin?" He said with happiness weaved into his voice.

I shrieked with delight and held out my small hands. He grabs on, as he always did, and begins spinning, which caused me to be suspended higher and higher into the air. A light pressure forms around my ankles but the smile plastered onto his face above me made me happy once more. The pressure plateaus and stays uncomfortably constant.

Then the pressure tightens suddenly, sending me hurdling towards sickly green flames. Before they could singe me, I jolt in my bed.

My eyes whip open and I feel the usual flow of heavy tears cascading down my cheeks. I'm breathing heavily, and begin the process of slowly moving my toes, then my ankles, and knees, and so on. Moving too quickly at once after the dream would only plunge me back into it. I have to get rid of the unpleasant events slowly and press them away with no sense of urgency, or else it would lash out.

I turn my head slightly to see the faded red and blue flannel that I didn't realize I was clutching so hard that my knuckles were free of color. It's always the cause of the dream. It belonged to him, after all. One of the tens of therapists I'd gone through in the past twelve years explained that the smell of him that was latched onto his clothes transmitted weird signals into my subconscious brain, causing these painfully realistic dreams that would reverse any progress I'd made in getting over him.