#krishdoeslit

i hope that i can start a new day

with you by my side

and not worry that you’ll disappear 

when I close my eyes.

but if you choose a different bed

to wake up in

and a different person

to wake up to,

i will gladly wake up alone,

turn to the deserted spot beside me

and hope.

hope for the moment when you realize

that the empty space in this bed

and in my heart

is your home.

when that moment comes,

i will be here waiting.

open arms.

I was standing on concrete, but I wanted to dig myself a hole. Is it possible to do it with my bare hands? At that point, I didn’t care if the small pieces of rocks pierced the skin inside my fingernails; all I wanted was to get out of there. Fast. I never understood what “crawl in a hole and die” meant until that moment. During the awards ceremony of my first time competing in the Division Schools Press Conference, it was like the world chose to clear things up for me once and for all.

I was surrounded by my fellow journalists and our two mentors. We huddled up below a mango tree on a small table — all 15 of us — as we anxiously waited for our names to be called. The space was cramped, but the coldness of our hands was enough to stop our body heat from making us all sweat. We were helpless. All we could do was wait. The outputs we trained hard for all year long were passed within an hour, and our careers could be determined in a few minutes. It was mentally exhausting.

Award ceremonies were always a pain to me. I, for some reason, never feel nervous as I’m writing. I’m always excited to compete and even more excited to receive the topic. Yet, when the time comes to find out whether my hard work paid off or if I need to put in more hours, my body freezes. That was what I felt that time underneath the mango tree. The fast-food takeout I ate during lunch slowly made its way back up my throat, threatening to burst if the tension became worse.

And it did become worse. I felt my feet sink more and more into the dirt even when it stayed on level ground. Features was one of the last categories to be called as if the announcers saw my anxiety and decided to multiply it by a hundred. I caught the gaze of my publication team halfway through the announcement. Some of us have already been called, and they couldn’t be any happier. They wore their gold medals proudly on their chests as if mocking the rest of us whose cold sweat came down like torrential downpour.

‘Please, call the names faster. Just rip it off like a band-aid.’

But my begging was useless. As time felt even slower, the table got less cramp and my feet bore a deeper hole onto the ground. Suddenly, I turn into a mole, scurrying down below to look for a safer place. Will my heart stop if it’s beating this fast? Then, a voice came booming down the speakers.

‘For the features category!’ Faster. I told my feet to go faster. This time around, time went by faster and my feet slowed down. Why is the world this cruel to me?

My friends cheered me on like an audience watching a circus lion jump into a ring of fire. As the third and second place got called, their cheering became louder than the announcer’s voice. I was stuck in my seat, sweating buckets. ‘Just do it.’

‘First placer for the features category. Christine-’

Is this real? I jump up from my seat, afraid to trip on the imaginary ridge I made with my anxious feet but not able to contain my excitement. This is only my first year in journalism but I already received two straight gold wins and a one-way ticket to Regionals? What was I being nervous about?

I looked around me expecting the same bright smiles and proud pats of my colleagues. But when I saw their faces, I saw the exact opposite. Shock. Embarrassment. They looked at me as if I was butt-naked in front of them. What I didn’t know was amidst my cheering, a different Christine was called. Same name, different district. Then I felt my whole body sink. Suddenly, the space underneath the mango tree felt big enough to fit ten versions of me lying down in a line. It was as if they cleared up that spot for me to sulk in. The safety hole was nowhere to be found. When I looked down, it was still concrete. Untouched, never broken.

What made it even worse was my classmates made me the butt of the joke for a whole month after that. Some of the boys on my team spread the story to our classmates back at school, so they were all in on it except me. I was Christine who celebrated early. Friendly neighborhood feelingera.

I took that moment to heart not because I felt embarrassed. That was indeed my most embarrassing moment, but I remember it mainly because of what happened afterward. Even when I wasn’t going to advance to regionals, I trained myself rigorously during my off-season. I wanted to make sure that no hole-digging was going to happen. Instead, I armed myself with iron boots and a weapon only I could have: my skill and passion for writing.

This morning, I was chased by a horde of undead at a shopping mall that looked an awful lot like my house. From the fading yellow paint to the chipping ceramic tiles on the terrace — it was my childhood home — except the interior was replaced completely by fully stocked shelves and aisles that seemed to go on forever. I still remember their trademark blue and orange colors. Even in my dream, the place was bursting with people. The buzz and the chatter seemed all too familiar. That is, except for the army of corpses at the entrance.

Everyone was running away from them, but they only seem to target one person: me. As I passed by familiar faces, some handed me loaves of bread and bowls of soup like some kind of sick zombie survival relay. That’s when I realized that I was alone. All I could do was run and look back at my pursuers. I was in danger until I opened my eyes. I found myself safe and sound in bed — blanket in a tangled mess, pillows kicked underneath, arms sore from clutching my bolster pillow too tightly.

It’s amazing how brains can dream. It took a random thing and made it the scariest experience I’ve had as of late. It’s a figment of my imagination, but everything felt so vivid. So vivid that my feet felt numb from all the imaginary running I was doing. It’s the nth night in a row that I’ve had nightmares, and each one just gets crazier than the other. Night after night, I long for one thing: to be able to control my dreams.

How great would it be to dream of your past life? Or to dream of what comes next in the future? For example, you’d dream about being a pharaoh being fed grapes next to the Nile. If you wanted, you could also dream of riding an express train without tracks; just a hovering vehicle close to what subways look like now. It’s not guaranteed to be happy 100% of the time, but at least it’s somewhat a reality. A vision. A clue as to how your life has been or to what it could be. Instead of something fictional that you can’t reach, something feasible can keep you on your feet. If I were to dream of myself sitting on a director’s chair as the crew waited for my cue, I would wake up happy and ready to start my day.

But I guess we can’t have everything we want in life. Besides, maybe dreaming is our mind’s way to let us rest from real-world problems. It’s just that sometimes, we’re way too caught up with them that it creates fake-world problems too. Maybe that’s why zombies tried to attack me in mine. The thing is, whatever it is that makes us dream, the greatness of it is that it’s fake. Like a suspenseful series, you’re watching on Netflix. You’re immersed because you’re comfortable that it won’t happen in reality, and the thought of waking up is comfort.