I don’t want to sleep tonight.
I don’t want to sleep ever again.
For my dreams relentlessly haunt me
With the specter of an alternate reality.
Once during a very stressful time,
I had a dream of being stuffed into a microwave
And cooked alive, writhing in agony.
The next morning I woke up in so much pain.
My muscles were stiff and unyielding.
I couldn’t even go to work that day.
My dreams now are worse.
And they come every night.
Every night is a different story.
Every night is a different adventure.
The dreams in and of themselves
Are not what bother me.
Nothing bad happens in these dreams.
Nothing painful is done to me.
The Dreamwalker doesn’t torture me.
And calamity doesn’t occur.
No, every night she shows up.
The dream isn’t about her,
But she is always there.
As if nothing ever happened.
And when I close my eyes I forget
Everything that happened too.
I forget that she had made her choice
To cut me off and never speak again.
When my mind enters
The space between time
It forgets about reality.
And tortures me with what can never be.
She’s there with me.
Everything is normal.
We don’t argue.
We don’t discuss the past.
She’s just there, always present.
I could be working in a strange job,
Picking out a new apartment,
Playing with my dog, or going for a walk.
It doesn’t matter what the dream is about.
She always shows up.
Why won’t you let me forget in peace?
Why won’t you stop torturing me?
Every morning I am forced when I rise
To second guess every second of the last three years.
I am forced to wonder what went wrong
That caused happiness to exist only in dreams.
It was a rare thing for me to remember
The adventures of the previous night’s slumber.
Not anymore.
I remember everything in excruciating detail.
You see, not only did she leave me,
But she left me holding the bag.
So many unanswered questions
I don’t even know what went wrong.
And in this plane of existence,
The one where I have no control,
I can only ask those questions at the wind,
Because she has suppressed our ability to communicate.
So every night, I slip into the stream
Of a parallel universe.
A universe without questions.
A universe without answers.
But a universe with her.
She refuses to leave.
She is waiting for me now
To drift into her clutches again tonight.
