Status: Completed.
Dreamwalker
he is a mirage
There is a man who walks through my dreams, some nights. His apparition slithers into my subconscious, becomes familiar with the tunes stuck in the corners of my mind. He doesn’t appear as often as I anticipate him to, though, and the meanings behind his messages will be lost if I do not pen them down as soon as my eyes blink open to the yellow glow of morning.
His skin is the thing that is most vivid, most memorable. It almost glows, peach pigment struck by the sun, smooth and flawless like some kind of liquid. I’m sure I’ve seen the veins through the back of his hands, though.
He has appeared in places I knew in childhood, in parking lots of the elementary school around the corner. Seasons have passed in these dreams – it has spun from summer to autumn in the blink of an eye, and we would sit in the same street, the street of the elementary school, and swat away the dead leaves, narrowly avoiding the passing cars.
I have picked him out of crowds at house parties, seeing movement through a window and feeling his presence before letting my body take control, before letting my feet lead me to him. I’d say his name, he’d acknowledge me, and we’d stand together in a hallway of a crowded house that was being drained by the second. “You’re going to make me cry,” he’d tell me, his eyes shining, fingertips trailing across his cheek. That morning, I opened my eyes to see the world through stray tears.
I have seen him in the evening, wearing sunglasses, his attention on others instead of myself. He’d mumble a number of years, like some strange puzzle that pained me to put together, and then stare at me, stare through me, stare into me. Soon, he’d disappear into a crowd as always, slip through my fingers like sand. It’s there for a second and then it’s gone, just like him.
There have been false alarms, too. In the places where my heart is most open, in the places where my ears pick up every bit of static, he could have been there. I saw him through a time machine, almost, through my own mind. Technology plays tricks, though, just like your eyes play tricks.
I have seen him in a wasteland, in a hopeless time, in the lowest kind of low, all fears realized. I don’t remember exactly what was binding humanity, but I remember the tone; the hopeless feeling, the dreadful feeling, the anxious feeling. Headaches. Constant headaches. He was there, he’d tell us, he’d always be there. The one last speck of hope, that one last grain of sand held between your fingers, put up to the sun. I saw him up against the chain link fence, as I was. Hot sand at our feet, twisted barbed wire above our heads, one faceless person between us. I float to him, I suppose. Almost. He is a mirage, he has to be. Or I am. We’re down on the sand, feeling the heat that we’d only just walked on – it’s in our hair, it’s on our clothes, it’s stuck to our skin. We’re connected, we have our own orbit, we roll around in the sand, weightless, we kiss. We feel. Even as something that had to have been a mirage, a dream mirage, I feel him.
I feel this dreamwalker, I feel him weigh down my eyes as I sleep.
His skin is the thing that is most vivid, most memorable. It almost glows, peach pigment struck by the sun, smooth and flawless like some kind of liquid. I’m sure I’ve seen the veins through the back of his hands, though.
He has appeared in places I knew in childhood, in parking lots of the elementary school around the corner. Seasons have passed in these dreams – it has spun from summer to autumn in the blink of an eye, and we would sit in the same street, the street of the elementary school, and swat away the dead leaves, narrowly avoiding the passing cars.
I have picked him out of crowds at house parties, seeing movement through a window and feeling his presence before letting my body take control, before letting my feet lead me to him. I’d say his name, he’d acknowledge me, and we’d stand together in a hallway of a crowded house that was being drained by the second. “You’re going to make me cry,” he’d tell me, his eyes shining, fingertips trailing across his cheek. That morning, I opened my eyes to see the world through stray tears.
I have seen him in the evening, wearing sunglasses, his attention on others instead of myself. He’d mumble a number of years, like some strange puzzle that pained me to put together, and then stare at me, stare through me, stare into me. Soon, he’d disappear into a crowd as always, slip through my fingers like sand. It’s there for a second and then it’s gone, just like him.
There have been false alarms, too. In the places where my heart is most open, in the places where my ears pick up every bit of static, he could have been there. I saw him through a time machine, almost, through my own mind. Technology plays tricks, though, just like your eyes play tricks.
I have seen him in a wasteland, in a hopeless time, in the lowest kind of low, all fears realized. I don’t remember exactly what was binding humanity, but I remember the tone; the hopeless feeling, the dreadful feeling, the anxious feeling. Headaches. Constant headaches. He was there, he’d tell us, he’d always be there. The one last speck of hope, that one last grain of sand held between your fingers, put up to the sun. I saw him up against the chain link fence, as I was. Hot sand at our feet, twisted barbed wire above our heads, one faceless person between us. I float to him, I suppose. Almost. He is a mirage, he has to be. Or I am. We’re down on the sand, feeling the heat that we’d only just walked on – it’s in our hair, it’s on our clothes, it’s stuck to our skin. We’re connected, we have our own orbit, we roll around in the sand, weightless, we kiss. We feel. Even as something that had to have been a mirage, a dream mirage, I feel him.
I feel this dreamwalker, I feel him weigh down my eyes as I sleep.