Am I dreaming, or am I awake?
It was a strange sight; gazing at the rumbling gray clouds decorated with streaks of silver and thousands of raindrop racing backward as I fell.
It was one of the few things I liked about my dream. A flash of melancholic tranquility tinged with an indescribable sense of longing. As if I was looking at an old album book unearthed from the dusty depth of the attic, its photos yellowed from ignorance and time, decorated with blurred faces I can no longer remember.
Soon enough, looming shapes of grey rushed past me from behind, converging on the precious patch of the sky like a pack of hungry beasts and swallowed it whole, engulfing my descend in inky darkness. The sensation of wind and raindrops caressing my skin faded, replaced by tendrils of black satin wrapping around my body, slowly tightening up like a cocoon till I could no longer feel letting out a breath.
An explosion of lights and colors, and my eyes opened to the dream.
For a moment, everything was hazy. Patches of colors and wriggling lines spasming in and out of focus, as if I was looking at a painting someone had carelessly left to the mercy of the summer drizzle. They danced around my vision for a few seconds, before coalescing into solid shapes.
Into a broken world.
Everything was constantly shifting between various states of decay and ruination. Broken. Rusted. Rotten. So much so that my head felt dizzy if I tried to focus on a spot for more than a few seconds, yet I was somehow acutely aware of everything.
The room was medium-sized, one of the only definite features being the pristine white bed I was sitting on. Sometimes I could see large cracks lining up the walls and ceiling, zig-zagging as if strokes of lightning were tearing through the surface, leaving dust and debris hovering thickly in the air, blinking into existence one moment and vanishing from sight the next. Sometimes a large chunk of the room would disappear, giving way to the pouring rain soaking the concrete rubbles and broken steel spikes jutting inward. Some of the glass panel doors would explode in a supernova of crystal shards gleaming with sunlight before the water swept into the room, like...like...
...like...what?
A sigh escaped my lips. Something about the dream made my mind conjure up a myriad of images I could never make sense of. Pebbles with pretty hairline cracks in the remains of a campfire. Shreds of old magazines and dead leaves that hadn't finished burning among the pile of ash. Fitting together the border and corner puzzle pieces one by one. Reaching back into the box for the next one, yet none remained but a picture of void and empty space framed by slivers of green earth and blue sky.
There was a time I would believe the dream was trying to tell me something. A message. A warning. A premonition. Maybe if I could pull together the right memories, I could fix this broken dream world. Find myself again. Reclaim the Emma Barnes I was supposed to be.
Now I no longer bothered with indulging that fragile hope. No longer playing along with these treasure hunts and not expecting to find anything. There was no point in digging deeper into these visions, as the bubbling water surface filled your view under the pile of rubbles. As each of your fingers and toes got wrapped in oily rags and burnt to blackened bones like birthday candles. As thousands upon thousands of insects merrily feasted on your body.
Now, I only wanted to wake up.
A tug of my wrist confirmed the object was still there. A small white wristband, something I recognized as those people used to secure an I.V. drip. My eyes traveled along the transparent tube filled with an inky, pulsating liquid over a crooked stand beside the bed and extending to somewhere on the impossible ceiling before dangling down to something obscured by the blanket from where I was lying.
VOCÊ ESTÁ LENDO
Best friend
Conto"Emma, wake up." "It's not good to sleep so much during the day, you know?"
