#alice.complex.

I had a dream she woke up beside you wondering if you were real.

Her whole life has been that constant chase, wondering if the people she had loved her whole life had been that mere illusion of a dream or if the truth you told her about chemicals had wired them all into believing their love for her. Had she been wired into loving you? Had she fell out of a dream into only another nightmare? She wondered this every night hearing your steady breathing by her ears and she wondered this every morning when you inevitably curled up into her. 

She did not know, but she wanted to believe you. She wanted to believe that each little tidbit you told each other to confirm the truth of what you had here, in the now, in this waking reality of hers, that it all meant something. That even though she wanted nothing more to fall back into that dream with the people she loved, that even though the thought of being there again was just a dream, she also understood the single truth of how you had crept into her heart too. She liked falling asleep to the sound of rain against the windows of this smoky world with you. 

You were the first person she chose, when every single other thing in her life had been chosen for her. You were the first person she loved of her own free will. 

I think often about why she chose you, and in turn, why he chose me. There’s a piece of me in you, as nature dictates whenever I write. It’s all an imagined world, but human motive is paramount in characterization. So even if you are so different from me, even if you are a microcosm of the rarest of my loneliest days, I have to think about such emotions and such parallels. 

She chose you because you would do the right thing for those you cared about, even if it meant you’d face a monster that terrified you. And as for me...

Well, that’s history, isn’t it? I think she knew from the moment she met you. Even though she lied to you about her name... even though you didn’t know yet the truth, the terrifying reality for her was that you made her see your truth.

There are some touches you cannot undo in the fabric of someone else’s reality, and it can remain stitched there in little pieces. It can scare you, the extent of all that. 

That being said, there’s a part of me quietly happy to write of you dreaming after. To write you dreaming of blue skies and green fields and bantering with people she’s never known. To write you at the side of the person you chose as your partner.

I write of you with a future that is untangled with hers, and somehow, I think that makes me happier than anything. Even knowing that you’d come back to do the right thing. Even knowing that you’d follow that red thread back to the maze. 

I think of the one you chose and how she’d run straight into that maze with you, knowing that it matters. You’re not special, really. It just happens that sometimes when you love someone, they can be infinitely more in your eyes. 

I had a dream that you were dreaming of the place you wanted to return to.

Even though it was a desert wasteland, you stood on the cliffside with her at your side. The sounds of your loved ones are nearby. Your brother is leaning against a large rock, a twig in his mouth. A soft snore escapes his chest, a small hum with the embers of the fire crackling to a start nearby. The boy who feels more like your brother than your real one is chuckling quietly as the girl he loves continues to chatter on. Their hands are full of debris and broken branches you’ve carried miles to get here. Even the liar amidst your group feels real and there’s no denying that smile.

You think so as she cranes her face one way to smile at you. The shadow of something approaches in the far horizon, but it’s a monster for another time. There is no reason to call a mirage home, but even so, wasn’t it real to you?

I curl up at your side in this small bed, listening to you breathe softly. I think of us lost in the fringe of these spaces, caught between a world that doesn’t exist and a world that’s too real. I don’t know where to go. Sometimes I dream of a small room in the air, so far away from all you’ve ever known. I’m a different butterfly in that space, a small bug that has not left its cocoon. 

I’m dreaming of white noise and touches that are not my own. I’m dreaming of screaming to this void of green lines in blank space, numbers and codes written to be a cell. I’m dreaming of you lost in that same space, not knowing and being unable to see me.

And I dream of you opening your eyes for the first time, caught between your dream and the world I have always known, a glitch in your skies. 

I think of how lonely it must have been closing your eyes to your world and waking up in mine. Someday, I fear that you’ll keep dreaming. That mirage is more real to you than anything you have ever known. Isn’t it?

You open your eyes and find me in the dark. Though your eyes are unreadable, I guess of your uncertainty. At least, I am unsure. So I tell you a truth that is a promise repeated. I tell you of a cell in the air with my name on it and of a white noise that raised me. I wait for your response and the sound of rain taps against the dirty glass panes that cut shadows into your face.

You whisper quietly that you like the sound of my voice under the sound of rain. 

This post is for myself, in order to organize story references and inspiration.

HC - alice.complex.