REM - H.S.

Chapter 3

AN:

details are so important.

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Years ago, I once read somewhere that our minds are incapable of making up new faces. That every face that has ever briefly flashed through your brain, every person you have ever encountered in your dreams, you have to have seen at least once before.

A haunting and recurring thought that I have tried to neglect ever since she first entered my dreams.

After that first night, the night where she had hovered above my unmoving body with shiny tears in her eyes and a look of desperation, I had tried to rationalize, to make sense of what I had dreamt, what I had seen. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror with my hands gripping either side of the sink as I stared at myself with wide and tired eyes.

You were so fucked up last night, Harry. Your mind was hazy, unreliable, playing tricks on you. Whatever you thought you saw, whatever you think you heard, it wasn't real. You were incoherent, belligerent.

That's what happens when you pop an entire bottle of oxy, fucking dumbass.

I believed that for a while, it was the logical explanation. Drugs make you see crazy shit, dream crazy shit. Like a girl whose enchanting mannerisms are seared into your frontal lobe and whose eyes are the last thing you see before you close yours at night.

It was the drugs.

It had to be.

Life after that went on as relatively normal. Her image didn't graze my dreams again and I slowly but surely began to forget. At least I tried to, I don't think I was very successful. 

The few times I actually slept through the night I woke up tense and even more exhausted than I was when I fell asleep. 

I sat in silence most days, left alone to my self-sabotaging devices. Sometimes I would wander around the city, not nearly as much as I used to, but just enough to keep me sane.

What a joke.

I went to Treffen's anytime it rained, an old tradition of sorts.

One of the only traditions I couldn't quite kick. You can blame Elliot for that.

The old 24-hour shoebox diner was quiet and quaint, a rare commodity in the city, but I preferred it that way. With black and white checkered floors and teal leathered booths, Treffen's was a character, that's what Elliot always said. They would usually play music on the dingy jukebox that sat worn and tired in the corner, but I had learned to drown it out.

Fauna was a waitress who had worked at Treff's for over thirty years. I had met her with Elliot when I first moved to New York for school about 4 years ago, and she was as spunky and kind as she was brutally honest. Telling me I needed to get a haircut when I had let it grow out for too long, but then offering to give me a trim on her lunch break. Or the way she would scold me for coming in at 3 in the morning after a restless night, but then bring me two cups of coffee for myself and the empty seat across the table.

She made it very hard to dislike her.

Sounds like someone else I know.

Did I know her?

Don't go there.

My nights were spent at Skeeters, a dive bar that just so happened to be my place of employment but more often than not, my place of self destruction.

It was shit in every sense of the word, but it paid the bills and kept me occupied. I didn't particularly like working there. I didn't particularly like anything, but I did appretiate that I usually wouldn't get home until 3 or 4 in the morning on most nights, and by that point I hoped that I was exhausted or drunk enough to pass out and not wake up till morning. Unfortunately it never worked out like that, and I was never that lucky.