Every night I am dreaming. Well, I don’t think I am dreaming so much as dreams are happening to me and swallowing me whole. If there is a way for the dreams to be the actor and me to be acted upon, that is how I would describe them. My closed eyes and half-lived-in body are canvas for my unconscious to play with paints and pens and swords. My subconscious is no longer part of me and yet at the same time the only part of me privy to my true innerworkings. I have lost access to deep reflection and careful thoughts and everything is passing by me while I run along with it and simultaneously drag everything to halt. My nightly terrors are all-encompassing, which is to say that they are expected and so intimate. As routine as the sore body that I wake up living in. And I still wonder when this body slipped into my bed.

I think I heard my name in my first nightmare last night. By that I mean it was cruel and whispering a prayer or a curse or a narrative to me. Or it may have been a delicate cry boding unwritten text – so paper-thin that the message disappeared when I called after it. Or maybe I have gotten all of this wrong and it was a scream. I suppose I will never know. Until tonight, subliminal-permitting.

My bed is war-zone which is to trivialize, but what I can say. I am drowning in my thoughts that do not exactly belong to me. I do not have ownership over my despair, in the sea of the night or in the hours of morning when I do not wish to be living. And I have yet to decide whether I want that power; or whether I should be grateful that it has, messily, been ceded to something or someone greater. I have previously discerned that power for its sake is a good thing, but I am beginning to doubt that conviction. And yet, maybe this is all for nothing, because when I slip into the ocean that is my repressed mind unveiled, I am underwater once again. All that to say, the waves and moon have far more control over my nightly fate than I could dream in daylight of having.

I would like to think that my body is my weapon, but my body is too tired of the lies that I feed it and force it to tell that I could write that and mean it. And if I could translate that to myself now or later or in my half-living state, I would write that I have lied so much that I have tricked myself into never being capable of grasping a full truth. That might not be true, but you might see why it becomes dusk too often to tell. It is not so much that my mind is playing tricks on me, but that I am, in totality, some grand trick; and I have covered what was once honesty in layers and layers and buried myself alive. Truth is unreachable, is foreign, is wasteland. And here I lie in the wake.