She awakens in a vice of shadow and air—her breath twisted, lifted, siphoned away by the unseen.
In the dark there is nothing. Yet she knows this nothing: a weight settling over her like a blanket she never asked for—warm, steady, looming.
A tear slides across her cheek as her fists curl, straining against an invisible bind. The weight holds fast, pressing with an intent older than her name.
“Move.”
A gasp escapes her. The grip loosens. She spills free of its intangible limbs, her skin alight with a thousand needlepoints of pain. Her palms trace slow, soothing circles over her arms and legs. Sitting up, she takes in the black—thick, endless—until her gaze drops to her feet.
Just beyond the mattress, her Italian Greyhound stands rigid, barking soundlessly—at her.
Before her hand could reach him, he bolted into the abyss. Her eyes fixed on the direction he ran, and with a sinking feeling she began to follow. Suddenly she tripped down invisible steps and gasped. Her feet caught on ground that felt wet, almost breathing.
As her eyes adjusted, all she could see and feel was a dark, warm brown hue surrounding her, a beat thrumming within and through her body—almost celestial.
Little by little she walked, sinking into some places, falling through others—sand or water, she couldn’t tell. It felt like the sands of time—or something. She didn’t know, couldn’t understand. Familiarity and fear pressed against her, threaded with calm.
She felt like water pouring into a plastic cup, recalling a drink poured into his hand. How she wished she could pour herself as gently into his fingers, touch his fingers—she’s touching his fingers…
Touching his fingers… everything stills.
“Close your eyes.”
She closes her eyes. The room vibrates, singing in a language only familiar to her in REM. The aurora borealis shifts in constant waves, and within its movement she sees his visage. Through the watery sands she walks to him.
She says nothing. Here exists only this space—the emotions, the past and present, the histories, the finite and infinite. She holds him close, giving and absorbing in a lovely loop, mending and sewing shut the little pieces left open long ago.
As she continues to enmesh with him, their bodies becoming one, she feels this: home.
“I’m home.”
A crack. Her eyes open. She sees herself as a child outside a glass house, nose bloodied. Her head lifts from his chest.
He’s gone. She runs, the crack widening as water begins to fall from above and rise around her, locking her in. Darkness consumes her as the glass shatters and cold liquid floods in, swallowing her at the pace of a typhoon. She chokes, drowning, swallowing the flood. Darkness floods her eyes, liquid filling her ears and lungs. Nothing can hear the suffocated…
Sound.
Sound.
The sound of a bark. Jasper’s bark. A gasp escapes her.
Her eyes flutter. She mutters in pain, jaw loosening as she spills to her side. Her palms trace slow, soothing circles over her arms and legs, cradling herself.
Slowly sitting up, she looks at her reflection in the dark window, though no reflection truly looks back. She gathers herself in her arms as if holding another body. A whimper slips out, soft and breaking, before she whispers—
“Oh… I miss who you were, before I knew.”
