It was six fifty-eight when Aranea managed to pull herself awake on the final night at Gammy’s house, lips parted in what she hoped was the dying end of a completely silent scream. The house was still around her, dark and silent just the way that she’d left it in the hours previous. A measure to keep the dead out, never turning the lights on. Sunlight would do more than enough during the day. But that had been the problem this time, and there had to be the specification of ‘this time,’ because the night terrors were many and unfortunately varying. Each left her feeling a little less stable. Each made breathing a little more difficult (not that it was easy to begin with anymore). She’d had to clasp her arms around her legs just to get how badly she was shaking back into control.
She’d dreamed she’d left the light on. That Gammy was there for a moment, and then she wasn’t anymore because Aranea had been dumb enough to turn the lights on.
She’d told her mother once that she was made of the roots of trees, grounded and steady. The second night she’d spent in the stranger’s house by the barricade, Aranea had dreamed that she’d become uprooted. The blonde might have considered it a nice break from the more vicious visions that had the tendency to plague her sleeping hours if it hadn’t been its own breed of incredibly unsettling. While she did not shake or weep or terrify herself out of sleeping, she did not close her eyes again. Aranea simply carried the weight of her being on her shoulders as she made her way to the barricade for the first time the following morning.
Which had led to the bleeding, more or less. The terrifying recklessness that her night terrors seemed to capture perfectly. Long, deep incisions ripped across the tender flesh of her stomach. A choking feeling, as the same deep gouges formed across her neck. Scarlet, scarlet, the taste of scarlet, drowning in it. Hollywood had led her to believe that when you died, your life flashed before your eyes. But there she was, struggling and convulsing on the beaten ground beneath the claws of a beast she knew no name for, and all she could see coming was darkness. A cool abyss, as if the shadows she’d learned to control were bidding her a last farewell. Her eyes had fallen shut just to fly open again, safe (enough) in her makeshift bed.
Her tree had fallen and she had perished. It had mattered then, but it hadn’t.
At twelve, she’d been worried about grades. The kinds you got on tests and important papers, not the ones they gave for doing your homework. She’d very pointedly found those grades deeply and astoundingly stupid, as she didn’t actually need to do her homework to maintain a good grasp on what she had learned. Why should she want to do six worksheets about the civil fucking war when she was already ready to be tested out of the class? At fifteen, her worried had turned to boys. Or, if she was feeling particularly pleased with herself, homicide. Gotta love television references.
Now, at nineteen, the burdens she carried with her were nothing so light. And the one theme that carried on through every terror, every thought, every breath was existence. She wouldn’t call herself existential, except that she very definitely would. Life was not a movie anymore, and she was past the point of being able to distance herself from it through the view of a lens. Pictures no longer stood as possible universes, left for her to create. They were capsules from better times. Worlds she had no knowledge of, past the inescapable knowing that those worlds were dead. The polaroids could be the only grave markers people like Mona and the Girl in the Blue Sundress would ever receive, miles and miles from their corpses.
Or maybe Aranea was simply worried, because she never dreamed about her heartbeat, so much as she did sound sleep. As she did the state of her consciousness, ever gradually slipping out of balance and off shore. As she did dying, and watching those around her die too. It made a girl feel small to stand beside a pile of her friend’s bodies, mangled and torn away. Smaller still to wake and realize she’d been the one to conjure such an image. The entire convoy, gone of her imagination.
Eventually she’d simply given up on sleeping. Exhaustion tasted sweeter than blood did.
