In Your Dreams // phan

s i x

Fuck.

What have I done?

The residual bliss I felt from the dream lasted only briefly. For a minute I was happy, remembering those hypnotic blue eyes and kind smile from the day before. I got lucky getting Phil. He was perfect in every conceivable way. But my heart sunk when I remembered that he wasn't lucky getting me.

What had Phil seen? Was it a good memory? I sincerely hoped so. But then again it didn't really matter. Because he would see the bad soon enough. There was no hiding it. If I was going to scare him off might as well get it out of the way now before I got too attached.

But who was I kidding? I was already attached. Helplessly and irreversibly attached to Phil. A boy who I had met with for little over an hour. A boy whose last name I didn't even know yet.

It was scary how quickly I'd fallen. But I supposed that was just what it was like with soulmates. It was different than normal love. It was cosmic. It was destined. There were a few cases where the system was flawed but usually it was spot on, and there was no fighting it.

Before, my soulmate was but a faceless, nameless entity. And even then I was determined to protect them. Even then I knew that I cared. But now it was Phil. It was a person with a body and a mind and a life and a past. My soulmate was real and I suddenly cared a thousand times more than I did before. But there was also nothing I could do to protect him anymore. It was too late.

My phone dinged and I cautiously looked at the message. I knew it was going to be from Phil. Nobody else ever messaged me.

Hey, I dreamed about you last night.

My stomach clenched so violently I felt like I was going to throw up. There was a small part of me that was hoping there was glitch in the system; that Phil wouldn't dream about me. But that was a stupid thought.

What did he see? How bad was it? He still sent me a message so that was a good sign, right? And he started with 'hey' and 'hey' is pretty casual. But then he also used a full stop and that made it sound kind of blunt and serious. But perhaps he was just a grammatically correct person?

I spent a few minutes pouring over the one simple sentence, squeezing every last drop of information out of it as was humanly possible, and reading far more into it than I should have. It was silly but I was paranoid by nature. This is what I did.

I realised I hadn't replied to any of his texts yet and nervously typed and re-typed before deciding on my deep and eloquent response of Yeah. Me too. Almost instantly I received a message back:

So... I guess we're soulmates! Hi, soulmate :3

I didn't reply. I couldn't reply. My hands were too shaky to type anything even remotely coherent. This couldn't be happening. I worked so fucking hard to stop this from happening. Sacrificed too fucking much.

And for what? Absolutely nothing, that's what. I still ended up at that particular library on that particular day at that particular time. And out of the hundreds of piles of books that I could have knocked over, I had to knock over his. Fuck the universe.

My phone buzzed with a new message: Any chance I'll be seeing my gorgeous soulmate at school today?

I didn't even process the fact that he'd called me gorgeous. I was too concerned with my answer to his question. Was I going to go to school? Before meeting Phil the answer was no. But then I met Phil and I seriously considered going. But then I thought about it more and changed my mind again.

And now I just didn't know. I didn't know what to think. I didn't know how to act. I didn't know what I wanted anymore.

Avoiding Phil wouldn't undo what I had done. The dreams had started and there was no way that I could stop them. But avoiding Phil would save me from having to face him. From having to see the disappointment in his eyes.

Those who dreamt talked fondly of dreaming, and those who hadn't listened enviously. The general consensus was that dreams were amazing, and I could see how people would think that as mine was amazing. I loved my dream. I loved seeing young Phil and feeling as though I was a part of his childhood. A part of his life.

But I highly doubted that Phil's dream would have been all that great, and what a shock that would have been. To find that these dreams that everyone had been raving about were the opposite of fun.

I couldn't see him. But I wanted to see him. Did he want to see me? There were too many thoughts in my brain, and they flew around at lightening speeds, not giving me time to process any of them. They were frantic and blurred and chaotic and it was too much. It was all too much.

Breathe, Dan. Just breathe.

I tried to listen to the rational voice but the sound was drowned by the storm in my head. And suddenly I didn't have a choice anymore. My free will was once again revoked by anxiety, as it decided that I wasn't going to school today. Instead it decided that I was going to heave until my lungs hurt; scream until my throat hurt; sob until my chest hurt. It decided to torture me, terrorise me, destroy me until everything hurt, and I was left an exhausted mess being consoled by an equally exhausted mother.

Anxiety was a sadistic bitch.

By the time I recovered school had well and truly started but I just couldn't find the energy to go. That is, until I checked my phone and saw that I had received more than a dozen texts from Phil.

They weren't messages badgering me about where I was or why I wasn't replying. There were funny texts making observations about his day so far, and sappy texts telling me that school would be so much more fun if I were there, and cute texts saying that he was so unbelievably happy to have met me.

It was strange how something so little could change my mood entirely. I went from one end of the scale to the other in record time when I read Phil's messages. He didn't hate me, and it was the best feeling in the world.

There was a chance that luck was on my side for once and he saw a good memory of mine. I knew as soon as he had a bad one he'd change his tune but for the moment, Phil liked me. He wanted to hang out with me. And as emotionally and physically drained as I was I really, really, wanted to take advantage of that.

I remembered the high that I was on after I met Phil and so desperately wanted to feel that again. To feel good about myself and prove that I was the one in control, not my anxiety. That was what I wanted. I'd made up my mind.

I wanted to see Phil again.