Writing Exercise #2: A Short Story About Dejection, Reoccuring Dreams, and a Plight for an End of This Life

  

    Not that this matters at all, but this following short story was born from a sort of fictional diary entry I was writing that suddenly, and without my control, turned extremely personal. Then, as I continued writing, a dream I had many years ago that has stuck with me since came back to me and I decided to combine these two things in some sort of halfway coherent short story. It seems all I write is about dreams in some way and I am actually getting extremely fed up with that. I hate my dreams, I hate what they show me, I hate the lack of sleep I get, I hate dwelling on any of this. But whatever. Hopefully this works as a sufficiently effective short story, and if not...well I don't really mind, I just want this writing gone and out of my head. My apologies to anyone out there reading this for it being so intensely personal. 

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The Same Image Haunts Me

    

    Another nightmare interrupted by the noxious sound of the doorbell. I couldn’t dare move, my limbs twisted in sweat-drenched sheets and a heavy t-shirt that clings to my pallid flesh. I wonder how she’s been sleeping since I left. It’s inescapable, it’s useless, it sickens me to the fullest extent; all my thoughts upon waking are polluted by her. Lying there in a profound, ugly haze, I vividly remember the feeling of her sweat on my arms as I wrapped myself tightly around her to try to help her sleep. How nearly every night it seemed we took turns in helping each other calm down - the two of us too nervous to face our respective dreams alone, if only we could stay up together and never need sleep, or maybe we could traverse each other’s nightmares and take turns protecting one another from whatever personal horrors would pop up to slaughter our respective sanities. Or maybe she’ll decide my dreams and cascading issues are too much to deal with in tandem with her own. Maybe she’d gladly suffer alone and ignore the abandonment she would force upon me. Maybe she sleeps just fine now and doesn’t have the time or mental capacity to think about me struggling through sleep and agonizing dreams without the one person in the world I put all my faith in. And maybe I shouldn’t care. But the dreams won’t end, and there’s no controlling the constant images and reminders of betrayal that reels unendingly throughout every moment of my maligned life. 
If only I could have known how the ending would be, now she’s the source of every nightmare I seem to have. She’s taken away my brain and left fragile glass rattling around in my sleep-fearing skull. Scraping and cutting at my bone and shredded nerves. I wake every day much too early, every fiber of my disintegrating body crying out for her. 
    But I can’t move. The doorbell goes off again and resonates throughout the lonely house like the peal of a cheap and badly cracked church bell - echoing out of key, burning my inner ears and mocking my inability to move. There shouldn’t be anyone at the door at this early hour of the morning anyway. Curiosity should take over me, but I can’t seem to care. I wonder how she deals with getting the mail on her own, she was always so nervous about the front door and of the horribly unfriendly mailmen that operated in our crumbling, cramped, and severely isolating city; now across the world from where I am now. 
“Sometimes I dream”, I would say to her in an embarrassingly bad Robert Smith impersonation, somehow making her smile. That smile that would stretch across her gentle face and reinvigorate my bloodstream. I should have known when I started seeing that smile less and less during the months before I was forced out. “People always seem so close.”
    It’s no wonder my dreams are nothing but nightmare recreations of the end when all I can manage to think about during every waking moment is her and everything that went wrong, several aspects of which I still struggle to fully understand. And if it’s not explicitly about her, then it will be some other phantasmagoric horror with her subtly involved or present to some degree. She has irrevocably altered my brain chemicals and my fragile sense of self, purpose, and belonging and then torn through that all like razor wire through dead flower petals. And somehow I find myself utterly disabled by worries about how she is managing - I can’t stop my thoughts from ensnaring me in questions. The urge to reach out and be there and see her happy, despite everything, causes the fabric of my being to endlessly teeter on the verge of collapse. And yet, all fears and doubts and reminders of pain dispossess me and leaves me alone to deal with this emotional nonsense. 
    There’s no one with me, there are no other means to get through this, to mend my failing brain and bring upon rapturous and much-needed rest. Life, as long as I plan to live it, will be a dirge march through sanity-consuming memories of agony and abandonment, every dream an out of control stress inducing simulacrum of every aspect of my life that has caused me strife, and every morning, when I wake up much too early with few hours of actual sleep, spent reeling with my thoughts of her running amuck. Nothing in my present means anything to me, the future has no shape whatsoever, and the past is ravishingly consuming me. I can’t take it. She was there again. In the next dream I fell into. It began once I heard that rancid doorbell again, a series of three evenly spaced out knocks, and then I slipped back to sleep upon my struggle to actually get up out of bed.
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    It was a familiar setting that manifested in front of me. A large, seemingly abandoned apartment building that cut above the dense fog and escaped far beyond my view. Its windows were blasted out, a fervent wind passing noisily through the chambers of the deserted building - and there I was. Somewhere inside this dejected, austere, and potentially ancient building waking up on a bare, bloodstained, roach-covered mattress - the only piece of furnishing in this squalid hole. To my right is a large metal door fixed from ceiling to floor, almost like it was welded completely shut, no light able to escape. Despite that, somehow an envelope slipped underneath the door and slid its way towards the side of the mattress where I groggily sat up as if I was waking up into this dream space. Clumsily, I picked up the envelope, swatted some of the bugs off, and opened it. 
    A heavily stained piece of paper that nearly crumbled in between my fingers that read; “A New Tomorrow Awaits To End This Unshakable Sorrow.” As soon as my mind registered these words fully, the piece of paper disintegrated completely to dust and fell like snow to all the bugs at my feet. Suddenly, there was something my dream self knew that seemed to have been psychically transferred from the words on the disintegrating page over to my brain. But what exactly? The part of myself that was observing this dream unfurl without any control couldn’t rationally know at all. I am never in control of myself in my dreams, and the dreams almost always play out in the third person. I’m forever the sole attendant of the grand guignol of my dreams. 
I looked to the blasted open window, shattered glass blowing across the filth-soaked floor. And suddenly, I was transported. Outside a new building, surrounded by an embankment of tall slender trees that seemed to be made of swirling tar - a sign from another dream of mine from long ago. The building was taking up the place of where my childhood home should be, and while the surroundings were strange and shifting in rolling spasms of claustrophobic darkness, the face of the building was all too familiar. It was the building that housed the apartment I shared with her - seeing it again, even in a dream, brought me immeasurably close to uncontrollable ugly tears. I could feel my sleeping self squirm and fidget, my stomach twisting, my teeth gnashing and grinding, as memories take violent hold over me. There was no escape, a horrific reminder of the life I once lived shoved in my face like the edges of a broken bottle jabbed in my eye.

    I stood at the precipice of this building, as the trees around me dripped little droplets of viscous black fluids that fell in reverse into the surrounding space, an onslaught of memories overwhelming me like a hangman’s knot tightening around my throat. Watching the tree outside our window progress through the seasons, being lost in each other on that dingy little bed, music piping through the halls, watching her absorbed in her books wishing I could swim around in her head, the smell of her incense and oils that perfumed the room with the scent of autumnal carnivals, her inability to reach out when I fail to fall asleep, overwhelming sense of shame after her witnessing me succumb to panic, bags packed, the last glimpse of her, the sense of betrayal washing over me and flooding out of my system until I realized I never stopped loving her. A razor blade gliding down my flesh again and again, nasty little habits picking up right where I left them two years ago.
I can’t take this. 
There was no possibility of waking out of this. The building started to shift as the blackness emanating from the tar-like trees took over and washed over the scene. Suddenly, the once familiar building became strangely and uncomfortably distinct in its dream appearance. It seemed as if all of the power was cut out, all the windows now mirrors into the churning blackness, and the only window that was illuminated was the window looking into the room we shared. The room where we, for a time, tried to protect each other from our dreams, was now lit up by a flickering dark orange glow. I watched as unidentifiable shadows passed at random intervals, momentarily obscuring the orange glow. I was guided towards it beyond my control, and as I moved closer to it a droning, atonal sort of music began to emit from the sky above me. A deeply penetrating sense of dread shredded my senses to oblivion as I made my way into the building and beyond. And in one hazy blink, I found myself back in our apartment with nothing about it being as I once remembered. Nevertheless, I could feel my dream self and my sleeping self momentarily converges as we both felt the bothersome, all-encompassing urge to burst into hysterics and slash away at our flesh until memories and dreams altogether meant nothing and there was only the tar-like blackness to succumb to. These memories are too much, too sickening to me.

 
When does it end? 

The doorbell sounded off again, I nearly woke up out of this dream, but the images took control and trailed back off as a series of three evenly spaced out knocks rang out after the doorbell.

The bedroom door opened up for me as formless shadows filled the room and the atonal drone continued to uneasily rumble my brain. I glided inside, a profoundly depressing trance guiding me, and saw that the bedroom as I knew it was instead an impossibly long room with an arched roof supported by thin wooden beams. It was almost like an attic but placed in the middle of the apartment building. The windows looked out into a great expanse of black nothingness where occasionally the sound of a strong wind could be heard. The drone continued, but now it was populated by tiny patterned sounds of something glimmering, like the darkness outside momentarily dazzled with inverted light every few seconds. I tried desperately to scan the room for any sort of familiar image or relic from my time there, no matter how painful, but there was nothing. I didn’t know where I was or what was to happen but the panic in my heart continued to swell to unbearable degrees. 
The entire space smelled of a decrepit hospital; rust, formaldehyde, plastic gloves, and bleach. Shadows began to creep out of the corners and take form around me. I couldn’t move. Faceless strangers, cloaked in off-white gowns that seemed to have flown into the floor and moved with them like ocean waves. Something about them seemed to me immediately to be ancient, born from something far beyond my comprehension. They whispered in a language I couldn’t understand and could barely hear over the drone, the wind, and the occasional glimmering sounds. A table appeared in front of me, it stretched indefinitely into the far side of the room and escaped into the dancing shadows. Suddenly all noise fell away and the ancient figments disappeared. Then a familiar scent, like a burning carnival tent covered with dead leaves and patchouli oil, overwhelmed my senses as I felt a presence approach behind me. Small, tender hands laid themselves on my shoulders, and for a moment I felt oddly comforted and lost in yearning before I shuddered with unease about what was to come. 
    I was pushed into a chair at the head of the table, the presence still behind me. Staring into the shadows that consumed the far end of the table in front of me, I watched as the strange shadow people emerged once more and took their place around the table. All of them had faces of uneven and impossible designs, all of their features skewed in some way or totally blurred into their impossibly pale flesh. The more I strained my eyes to make sense of their faces, the more blurred they became and the more my head throbbed with horrible, gripping pain. The drone started up again and the familiar scents of a burning carnival began to have a sickening effect on my senses. My whole vision blurred and whirred, my head filling with haze and bubbles of stomach acid. All of the shadow people with their faces of emulsifying, mercurial features populated the table aside from one chair directly adjacent to my place at the head. They all stared at me as the whole room rumbled and flashed with the flickering orange light. 
    Behind me, the night rolled on in its shimmering void-like darkness. The entire room seemed to close in on me as the shadow people, with their off-white gowns flowing into the floor and intermingling with each other, continued to stare at me in utter silence. I shifted in my seat, but couldn’t move much more than that. Heavy droplets of liquid started ravaging the room above us and the orange glow flickered wildly like it was on the verge of exploding. And for whatever reason I began to think about the time we nearly had a pregnancy scare, the anxious measures in place, the pills she had to swallow, the both of us awaiting the ensuing nausea she might feel and how to deal with it. That was one of many moments that stick in my head as moments where I knew I wanted to stay with this person forever, and I couldn’t ever articulate why. Perhaps it was in those moments of panic and of her being in a position of great discomfort or in the midst of a struggle that I knew for sure that I wanted to brave anything with this person and stick by them indefinitely. And the prospect of a child, the sense of family, as much as I would reject that, almost for a second seemed like something I wanted with this person. It was moments like that where I felt the space between us had nearly completely evaporated and I would feel myself melting in totality into her as our beings were one in spite of the suffering the world would throw at us. I was one with this person, so I thought, but that was taken away and here I was in this nightmare landscape thinking of nothing but her. 
     The shadow people continued their uninterrupted staring as I was absorbed in memories of sorrow and unrequited feelings that I didn’t really understand, my dream eyes welling with tears and my sleeping self grinding my teeth to the point where one of them chipped. My mouth began to move, trying to form words out of the barbed-up emotions that were closing up my throat. The presence behind me trailed away and took the empty seat adjacent to me. They too had a similar indistinguishable mess of a face as the others around the table, but this one was the only one who wouldn’t look in my direction. The other attendants started to knock on the table. Three evenly spaced knocks, then a pause, repeat. 
     The thing seated adjacent to me placed a small, pale hand on their face and removed it - revealing it to be a mask. The drone turned into a horrible wail as the mask hit the floor and disappeared. Behind the mask was her. Her perfectly dark eyes facing the ground. Words finally escaped me beyond my control. I uttered, “I wish I could see you smile.” But these words seemed to have caused the room to begin to shake. The shadow people all arose from their seats, the knocking still continuing after they’ve removed themselves. They began to close in as I watched her face morph and dissolve into murky, empty paleness. She started shaking uncontrollably and I wanted nothing but for the dream to end, but I was bound to this chair in this nightmare until it was done with me. 
The shadow people moved closer in, her face swirled into a spiral of nothingness that caved in her face - I wanted to scream, I wanted to reach out, I wanted to do anything to help her even if she was a dream projection made purely to torture me. But I couldn’t do a single thing but sit and watch as the swirling vortex of her face rang out with a strong gust of wind and then birthed an anemic, pinkish fetus-looking thing that plopped onto the otherwise empty table. It had no human facial features and instead resembled a series of budding poisonous flowers on top of an anemic little alien body. Each of the flower-looking buds that made up its head opened up and a series of sickening howls and whimpers rang out. She collapsed to the floor as the thing that came forth squirmed helplessly on the table directly in front of me. 
    The last thing I had to bear witness to was the shadow people taking off their faces and descending on the poor fetus thing to slowly and meticulously devour it in front of me. 

Then the doorbell. And I jolted up awake in a terrible sweat with every blood vessel in my body aflame. My heart felt as if it was on the verge of total failure and my vision was supremely blurry. And despite the overwhelming fear I was feeling as a byproduct of the nightmare, there was a far more intense feeling of anguish in how much I missed her. Which was of course coupled with a tremendous sense of shame in witnessing the images my mind conjured up. I hope she was okay, but I couldn’t dare reach out. 

    The doorbell rang again, three knocks followed, and I managed to finally get up out of bed, put on my robe, and descend the stairs where I saw out the small slivers of windows that the sun was still not up. I reached the front door and opened it in the middle of the third knock, but no one was there. Left at my feet was a package with my name on it, but the wrong address. My heart sank to my gut when I saw that the address was that of the apartment building we shared. I looked around my empty suburban block, looking for any signs of a delivery person or anything that would explain this package. But there was nothing. Nothing except for a few trees in the distance that seemed far too slender, far too tall, and seemed to be made up of a strange sort of tar-looking blackness. 
    I decided to open the package right there on the doorstep. I dug my gnawed-at fingers into the taped seal and hastily ripped it apart with what little energy I still had. What immediately greeted me inside was a pale, smooth, featureless mask with a letter that was presented in a reddish gold piece of embroidery. It smelled of burning patchouli. The letter read; “Welcome to your new tomorrow, it’s time to do away with your useless sorrow.” Underneath the note something was wrapped up in old newspapers and what appeared to be bloodied rags. It moved up and down with possible breath, and a small wheeze seemed to emit from it. Slowly I unwrapped it. 
    What was in front of me, as the disgusting sunlight began to cut away at the darkness of early morning, as more and more trees around me began to drip with tar, and as a piping, drone-like wind resonated through my empty street, was the alien fetus thing, with its wailing head of budding flowers, wheezing and heaving with life. 
    I was frozen for what could have been minutes as my heart nearly eviscerated itself through my chest. My entire being shook. My senses overwhelmed by familiar smells and vivid memories of the past intermingling with an overbearing and gripping feeling of dreadful guilt and shame. I left the package there, I left the alien fetus I just moments ago watched get devoured in my dreams, I left the pale mask and the mocking letter. And as thoughts of her spun corruptive tapestries in my head, I fled back upstairs to my isolating bedroom and tried my absolute best to resist the urge of opening up my own wrists. 

END.