The first night she dreamt of him, she thought nothing of it. Dreams were figments of the mind and nothing more. Besides, these were incoherent images; a shadowy figure at the window of an apartment she couldn’t recognize, the city lights below like fire in the streets, smoke drifting between fingertips. The second night she decided that it was a coincidence; black silk sheets, with charred cigarette burns, peeled back to reveal soft emerald eyes. But the third time she dreamt of him, with his knees plunged into the foaming surf sinking into the sand?
Come back, come back, come back.
The visions meant nothing to her--never was there a clear face nor a single syllable of a name to recognize. But each time she awoke with a gasp in the grip of panic; the incomprehensible terror of emerging from a dream so vivid, the waking world seemed the dream--yet filled with content so unknown that neither seemed real.
Who are you?
Are these dreams or memories?
After each awakening, the echo of the feeling lingered like an aftertaste for over an hour. Needing something tangible in order to root into reality, in order to drive out the questions rolling into her mind like an impenetrable fog, she sought distraction:
Charcoal at her fingertips. The warmth of Decker’s bed.
A silent drive through the city, windows down and the wind rushing past her ears, going well past city limits to hunt, to feel death at her teeth.
She went to the ocean’s edge after the third awakening, its salt spray like the perfume of a familiar friend. Haunted by the undercurrent whisper of an omnipresent instinct to return, she plunged waist-deep into the churning sea to feel it. Losing track of the time that passed as each ebb pulled her body deeper, consumed with the single thought: that she’d emerged too early from the sand, that she didn’t
belong here.
This time in the dream, there was a fire. When she woke, the ocean waves became a Siren’s song that pulled her directly to them as if to quench the flames that lingered behind her eyes. She could feel the sensation of water pooling just below her chest but not the wetness against her skin. It was like walking, half-awake, into a dream.
