Voices Submission, Edition 2

The thing about dreams is they never star at the beginning- there is never a back story. Your subconscious always lands you right in the middle of the plot.

I am standing on the sidewalk of a dark street, facing toward opposite side and down, as if waiting for something to come down the road. There are buildings lining the street but they are empty and dark. There are no stars and no light comes from the moon. The street light fills the street with eerie yellow light. I am naked, but not in a sexual way. I am vulnerable, raw, exposed; like an open sore. It is cold and I feel the wind raise bumps across my bare chest and legs. I shiver. I see someone approaching on the other side of the street. I recognize their movements and the rhythm of their steps as belonging to someone I love. I only call their name but really I am calling for them to save me. To cover me, to heal me, to take away my vulnerability and fear. I call again, but to my surprise, they keep walking. I call a third time and they grimace, I know they hear me, but their eyes stay forward, completely ignoring my voice. My voice raises in pitch and panic as I keep yelling. Don't they know that I need them? That I am begging them to come and wrap me up and save me from all the fear welling up inside of me? Soon I am screaming as I realize that the nightmare of being alone in this terrifying state is becoming a reality. Soon they are gone.

Like a light switch in my head, I am transformed. I am empty. With vacant eyes I pick up the threadbare blanket that is at my feet. I slowly wrap it around my yellow, quivering body and curl up on the black asphalt. The cold from the concrete seeps through my covering and lodges itself in my bones and in the empty space in my chest. It is as if some invisible hand has come and scooped out my insides from my toes to the tips of my fingers. I am a shell. I feel nothing but the cold and that is only because my body is racked with shivers. My vacant eyes stare out into the dark street as the silence envelops me.  

I wake up. I roll over in bed, yawning, stretching. My mind only contain half formed thoughts such as: ‘It’s so warm, I just don’t want to get…’ and ‘maybe no one will notice if I just stay here all…’ But then I remember. My eyes fly open, my body shivers and my head starts to churn. What did I just dream about? Who dreams about stuff like this? Why am I dreaming about this? I have a great life: family that loves me, a happy disposition, friends that accept me. Why would my subconscious concoct something so dark and terrifying and why do even now, as I think about it, my head start to feel constricted and my heart starts to pound? I pull myself upright on my bed, pulling the covers along with me, all the way up to my chin. My heart rate starts to slow as I start to reason myself out of my fear. My mind continues to run though the list of possibilities about the eerie and very uncharacteristic-of-myself dream and I come up with a possible answer to my questions. I don’t know who or what controls dreams but I think that I know this: that this dream revealed to me what I fear most. I fear vulnerability. I fear betrayal. I fear rejection. I fear these things so much that my subconscious turned me into a shell, a body with no mind. But I fear this even more. I fear the kind of coldness that settles in your bones. I fear oblivion. I fear losing myself. I fear being dead in the soul but still clinging to life, a body still intact and functioning but now with no purpose or meaning. I fear the darkness in the world. For a person that lives so much of her life in the open, bright world, someone who had always lived in a safe place, free from fear and darkness, I realized that I have many fears. And that these fears are so powerful that they could, if I let them, define me. I could shut everyone out, I could never open up to anyone. But I can’t and I won’t. I am stronger than anything I fear.