This summer, we asked participants to submit work for the second year in a row as part of our Invite To Write Challenge. Throughout the fall we will share some of these pieces from our prompt, “Another World, Another Time.”
Next up is “Dream Void” by a participant who would like to remain anonymous.
Dream Void
I had a dream. I was walking down the hallway to class. U.S. History maybe? It wasn’t set up in a classroom orientation that I recognized– I was on the right but cantered in space, and everything was tilted ten degree off but not, kinda like that one scene film type in movies, the Dutch Angle?– and all the sudden I get a bunch of FaceTime calls. One call from K, two from G. Somehow someone knows it’s G and says something like “wow, he never calls anyone.”
I feel very alone- I had a dream the other day that It was back and I had no one. I walked into school and there was no one. No one in the evening when I take E for walks. No one at night. No texts. No connection/s. Then I call G and no one answers. Once. Twice. Anyway…
After class, school is out and I go down the stairs– I see K and G and J in the hall but I can’t talk to any of them; I have another meeting for some club– any club. Afterwards, G offers me a ride and I say no, I have another…something…happening. Liar. I wait for a few hours and then go to watch a school basketball game, at least, I think it was. All I remember is polished wood floors and rusting bleachers and piercing white lights that blind me when I look up. I don’t actually watch the game- players and balls and baskets- or if I do, that memory is no longer in my mind. Lights. Floors. I need to go. Escape. I can’t breathe. I can’t be here anymore. I can’t do this. I walk through the choke-hole of an exit and push past twin doors and half-run down a miles-long hallway. I find rows of deserted classrooms: hall and door and door and door and door and fading lights sprinkled throughout; just enough photons to not bump into something but not enough to see. I can’t tell if the doors to the classrooms are open or closed. I can’t remember, either. Doors run down forever. There is water on the worn, barely pink tile of the hall. It is a whisper of death-dusted rose petals. Then: puddles everywhere, blocking me, trapping me. I finally find a suitable classroom at the impossible and nonexistent end of the hall, and it seems empty, like no one has been there and no one will be for a good long time, if ever.
I stand at the door. I disappear. I re-enter the world. I am lying on the ground somehow. Drag myself to the wall and I need help getting up, struggle and hoist myself against the thickly painted brick, crawl vertically up the wall inch by inch. Standing, dizzy. Steady. I rub a generous dollop of foaming hand sanitizer on my hands. The bubbles in the hand sanitizer fizz out and pop, slowly disintegrating and degrading until only a small pool of water remains, seeping into my skin. I notice there is something wrong with my shorts. I don’t remember what; there is nothing there, but there is, so I hold up a long skirt my mind invented instead. Printed orange blossoms and blue lavender on gauzy white fabric; ruffled and cinched at the top. I go outside. Soft blades of grass gently tickle my feet. A single ray of sun dares to shine from behind mountainous clouds. Ominous. I need to talk to J. Then I cross the parking lot to a grassy area where J and some other people (Filipino Culture Club?) are practicing a dance. I can’t get to her, so I join them. Someone raises me up by the waist and I’m floating, I’m actually floating, I’m lying at a diagonal on wisps of air and dancing; kicking and waving my arms; the feeling of light cotton on my legs and getting lost in the easy contentment and riding the swirls of wind. Then it ends.
I talk to J and ask for a ride- she says she can’t. G is gone. I have no one. I walk across the parking lot the long way, horizontally, over obsidian-sprinkled pavement and the grassy area and then the world fades, narrowing to a door set in a wall textured like my house’s ceiling. It is a plain, unflattering plywood like brown short-grain rice with lots of knotholes. I open it. I enter the room.
The air is both a starry, spacey explosion and extremely nothing. Supernovas and black holes and shooting stars overlaid with blurred grey and cream. There is a window to the right with a desk underneath, a bed opposite. The blinds of the window are shut tight- no light penetrates save for the faintest ash-colored edge of the border. The desk is battered aluminum, dented and cold, barely thicker than cardstock, with a thin shelf in the bottom where one might put their feet. Theoretically. It is entirely empty. The bed looks like a nice prison cot: stark white, firm mattress, a thin pillow that provides only the slightest comfort from lying one’s head down flat. At the very top of the wall above the bed, there is a tiny window, like also in prison cells but smaller, smaller than my palm even. I have an overwhelming urge to lay down in the bed, and can’t fight it, so I do. I lay. I lie.
I don’t quite remember what happens next. I battle someone or something in my dreams; I am wearing a white shirt with jagged words on it and something is still wrong with my shorts and there is nowhere to hide. I recall colors like bleeding paint- crimson, aurora, jet back, a deep acidic blue that is just the tiniest bit teal. Like peacock feathers in a tsunami at midnight. I am exhausted from fighting. I am exhausted from existing. I feel pressure weighing down on my back until I cannot stand it anymore; they are watching me from outside the room. There’s a diffuser in the corner of the room where the wall juts out slightly. I lay in the bed for maybe hours, maybe days, maybe months, back and forth between sleep and not-sleep, demons in my dreams and paralyzed awake. I am a misfit and do not belong. I should leave. I am wrong. I am always wrong. Everything is dark and consuming.
I wake up another time. Black trickles and streams around me in the air like that one odd Billie Eilish video, but I’m not sure where in my room it is. Metallic blue and maroon. The world is as if a black-and-white filter has been laid over my eyes, blanketing my sight in scratchy wool visions. Fuzzy. Static. I lay there. Nothing. Not moving my eyes; gone from this place. Then I am at the door– I do not remember getting up and walking over. How did I get here? I stare at it. The doorframe. Space. I cannot move.
Then I am looking outside, blinking. Just existing. Existence. Grass and a parking lot. There is no one save a few people in the distance- maybe? How long was it? Have days passed? Hours? Only a few minutes. Months. It seems as if only a half-hour and half a year have passed at once. Then everything is falling and deep- a black hole, sucking me down and away and away and away, my throat makes screams that are not heard but felt.
I wake up. It was so real. So unbelievably real. So weirdly, undeniably, painfully real.
