laryngospasm
You don’t know if you’ve ever felt so full.
The way their being melts around you, fusion on metaphysical level, languid waves, alive … you are sure that you have never felt so full, so awake, so complete.
Wake up.
The waves crash over your head, pull you under into a maze unexpected, one you fail to recognize as the mirrors of your own mind. Tendrils wrap around your flailing limbs, hold you tight, tighter, secure. They feel like comfort, warmth in this neverness.
Wake up. Now.
And the guilt – it moves with the speed and strength of a mountain boulder, hammering into your chest with the desperate force of falling stone. You gasp; your lungs collapsed, it feels as if your entire upper body is engulfed and filled up to the brim with living liquid, spilling over. Your head is a pounding mass of confused thoughts, moving faster, spinning spinning spinning spinning—
-please.
A mouthful of air, sweat running down your neck, you shoot up.
Panic rocks through your system, an ache down from the base of your skull to the very end of your spine, small shocks reminiscent of lightning. Except that there is neither storm nor electricity in your closest vicinity. It’s just the pitter patter of heavy rain against glass, filling the apartment. You take a couple of deep breaths to steady yourself, dragging a hand down the side of your face. Fuck. Just as your heart rate finally slows a bit, you hear thunder rumbling in the distance, a dark grumble in the clouds. Maybe you spoke too soon.
No storm my ass…
Your chest is still heaving, the usual exhaustion you feel after waking up gone completely. It fills you with a weird familiar wariness, one you neither know nor can place in any of your recent – or older – memories. It makes no sense in the context of your dream.
“What the fuck is wrong with us?”
It sounds less like a question and more like a prompt, a statement not meant to accuse but ringing true nonetheless.
We haven’t accustomed yet.
They are quiet, softer, but not in the way their usual warmth bubbles at the back of your mind; instead, there is a wariness there, too, a distance instead of tightness. You recognize now that it is the same feeling you can’t identify. It is not yours. For the first time in a while, they are openly concealing.
There is no reason to.
Wary.
“You’re being different.” You say it with quietness too, making room for their carefulness. Something recoils in the back of your mind, an alarm ringing off that is not yours either and makes your limbs shiver for a moment. Something akin to … guarded panic fills your head, and now you are genuinely concerned. You want to know. You want to understand. Why will they not tell you?
Can’t. Can’t. Can’t-
There is a pull again, drawing you back by the ankle, so sudden you let out a yelp. The surprise translates into an automatic response, muscles responding, posture even in lying ready to strike, defend, defeat. It is no use. It is no use-
In the same second, the skies light up, so bright your sight loses focus for a moment; the edges of the room start to disperse, thunder now so loud it fills the air with electricity. You can feel goosebumps forming down your neck as they pull around you, seeping out of your skin and around you instead, surrounding inside and out, feeling almost complete again; but something is different, something is wrong, and you can feel it in the hesitation that lingers in their formless mass as you finally recognize the change. They close around you, but they do it warily. Conflict bubbles up from their corner of your mind, and before you can ask more, push for an answer, the air around constricts and they are ripped out of you, away, splattering apart into the air, still floating.
You only understand that you are screaming when your lungs beg for breath themselves. A feeling so foreign it clouds the pain for a heartbeat, and with it the sense of betrayal that fills you out.
Both of you are still in the air, you realize, and nothing makes sense as the room fades away, everything fades, you-
-open up your eyes.
It takes a moment to take the surroundings in, to truly wake up and become aware.
Cold air kissing your shoulders. Light of an electronic clock illuminating the bumps in your blanket, the edges of the cupboard. Your own breath, calm and steady against your racing heart.
Dreamed of them again.
It fills you with a sense of dread, painful longing, regret and helpless anger; pinpointing down what it means is too hard for a shattered mind, and the tiredness compels you to give up before trying. You’ve broken your head many a time about this, them, you, something that used to be us.
I miss the way they would say it. ‘us.’
For a moment, your pulse hurts.
It’s been a while since you have been confronted with the emptiness in your chest, the void that once was filled. It remains as it is.
After they left, everything felt void.
It must’ve felt void to them as well.
What a weird way to wake up.