Sleepless

(A 10-minute freewriting exercise)

I was lying on my back facing the ceiling and wishing the images would go away. They were too clear, too pressing, too real to move away as quickly as I wanted them too. And I couldn’t write the dream off to stray wanderings of my thoughts. He was not someone to come up in conversation or even a person I thought of every day. Why did he have to come tonight? Why did he come unbidden when he had hurt me enough in the past?

My thinking must have been too loud, my emotions too out of check for her to sleep silently anymore. She stirred next to me, her arm reaching out to push some invisible strand of energy away from my abdomen. How she knew these things was far beyond me, a mere human in her strange world. In her sleepy haze her fingers made strange circles only the width of a hair above my skin. And I felt like I always did when she moved me. I felt like stirred water, shimmering and swirling, the molecules unsettled and unsure. The dream moved silently around inside me again, I could see her feel around the edges of it to test its truth – a meter only she could see and hear.

And I sighed suddenly, letting the feeling of desperation have a sound at least, if it could not have a voice in this dark night. In my dream I had held my horror and grief in check. Could I do the same in this quiet room where she would accept it all? I wasn’t sure, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know anything anymore except that I wanted to find the boy from the dream and demand assurances to which I had no right any longer.