Hidden

I ensure that my room is safe. Danger-proof. Then I relax.

I fall asleep, dozing off into the darkened dreams that only affect the tainted, the ruined.

I see the past. I see the old me, beating me, leaving me in pieces on the floor, crumpled up like a broken doll, for the bruises to bloom in ugly purples, yellows, and greens. I watched my mother crying as she had to watch.

Why couldn't she protect me?

I watched her watching me. It seems to drive a stake through my heart. It hurts so badly, to remember, to dream.

The dream twists itself until it is purely a nightmarish terror. The old man is transformed into a monster, flailing at me with cloven hooves and curved horns. My mother is now a fiendish, angel-like creature, her tears replaced with a satisfied smirk. The room is now a black hell, the walls mutating into giant columns of molten rock and magma, the spires replacing the roof. My body has given up, and I feel myself slipping away in the dream.

I wake, terrified. My head, my heart, were too black. It was best that I left the girl alone.

It was naught but late afternoon, now. I couldn't leave my room. I couldn't sleep. The dreams were enough of a threat to keep anyone awake. Too bad I was nobody.

I stared out of my window, watching the sky melt from the light blue, to vivid pinks and yellows, to bloody crimsons and scarlets, and finally to a dark navy. It inspired me, and frightened me at the same time. The dark reds were reminiscent of days when the danger was awake when I arrived home, and yet the ease with which it went from color to color was inspiration for my fluid disappearances.

I watch the stars come out, making a silent wish on each.

I ignore the sharp pains that plague me; my body obviously doesn't realize that it's nobody. My head aches so badly, my stomach protests its emptiness, my eyes clamour over my lack of sleep. I'm so tired, so hungry. Yet I sit and watch as the moon finally lowers itself over the horizon, as the sun had so many hours ago.

And it begins again.