"Where am I?" I pondered, looking around.
The darkness of my dream had enveloped whole.
I knew this was a dream because I recalled laying down on the floor to rest a while ago but for whatever reason, I could feel this suffocating grip pulling deeper into a realm of despair and tornt as if this was reality.
'Where am I going?' I asked myself as I began wandering around the darkness.
I tried imagining buildings and people appearing out of thin air but I was unable to change anything in my surroundings.
"Isn't this a dream? Shouldn't I be a god in this world?" I asked, disappointed by my lack of control.
With each step I took deeper through the unknown void, an unexplainable burden was weighing heavily upon my heart, threatening to crush under its weight.
'Why do I feel like I'm walking with a thousand pounds attached to ?'
As I gazed downward, I witnessed my body sinking into the ominous embrace of this inky and viscous liquid that was eager to swallow whole.
'What's this?'
It was as if the darkness itself was hungering for my surrender.
If this was the real world, I would've been struggling and racking my brain to escape this predicant I was in but understanding that it wasn't, I made the conscious decision to relinquish control and allow the darkness to consu.
It was futile to struggle against the inevitable regardless.
The deeper I sank, the more this sense of eerie calmness settled over , numbing my every sense and enveloping in its cold embrace.
By the ti my entire body had sunk into the liquid, it was like I was trapped in a prison where I couldn't move a single inch of any of my limbs.
It was like being encased inside a giant pool of jelly.
'Ha... is this ant to be a nightmare?' I asked myself as the bodies of people began materializing around .
Their expressions were twisted with what I could only assu to be resentnt; that'd make the most sense.
There was my Father, a bottle of vodka in his hand. His bloodshot eyes were filled with venomous anger and with a drunken slur to his voice, he began unleashing a flood of accusations that sliced through the air coldly.
"Worthless piece of shit," he spat, the stench of alcohol perating from his mouth even though he wasn't real.
"I should've never had you. Your mother was a whore that I only planned on keeping for a while. You were never ant to be in this world. You were never ant to be alive."
He took a swig of his vodka and gazed back at . "Everything wrong in my life is because of you. You ruined ." And then he literally spat on .
'How's he able to move so freely in this liquid but not ?' I wondered. 'That's not fair,' I pouted.
Beside him stood my mother, her gaze cold and distant. "I should've aborted you," were the first words she hissed at .
'But without , how would you be able to afford all the drugs needed to sustain your lifestyle?' I chuckled.
"If you were never born... if you didn't chain my life to that terrible man, I could've left. I could've pursued the life I always wanted. I was ant to be a model walking down runways and you stole that from . I sacrificed everything for you and you repay by taking my life?'
'A model? Your face is barely a three out of ten.'
From the shadow, more and more people from my life back on Earth erged.
There were the delinquents from rival schools, their sneers etched upon their faces. "You thought you thought you were better than us, didn't you?" one of them taunted with a voice dripping with disdain.
Another one chid in, "Just because you had good grades and had a clean image at your school."
A third said, "All those A's in your report card, where did that bring you? Nowhere."
"You're a failure, just like the rest of us."
"You're not better than us."
'At least I'm not dressed in a spiked jacket and rocking a mohawk. What is this? The 1980s?'
People from all different eras of my life, so of whom I'd even forgotten, began speaking all at once, overlapping each other.
Their bitter words reverberated through the nightmarish landscape but none of them could ever pierce my heart.
Any accusation they had on my character, none of them struck deep. There were no old wounds for them to reopen. There were no fires of self-doubt that burned within for them to fuel.
There was no weight of their bla pressing upon my shoulders. The only weight was the weight of the liquid I was encased.
'When can I get out of this dream?' I pondered.
I was blocking out the noises coming my way because it was distracting but when it did beco silent — my attention was pulled back in.
I looked around and the sea of torntors had vanished and alone stood a figure.
It was dark in the liquid so I couldn't see them as they stood from afar.
'Can you please get closer? Whose turn is it?'
The figure was shrouded in this cloud of mystery yet, for so reason, they were radiating a strange sense of familiarity.
There was no choice but for that to be the case because why else would they get the spotlight all to themself?
'This must be the final boss of this nightmare.'
That unknown figure slowly approached, revealing itself to be a female although her features were still obscured by shadows.
'Could you walk any slower?'
As she erged from the depths of my nightmare, the surrounding darkness and the inky liquid vanished, leaving just the two of us in this infinite space of white.
I didn't even have the ti to think about the change or look around to see what else was in my dream.
I just looked at the woman in front of in complete silence both in mind and mouth.
I didn't speak, not because I didn't want to or couldn't open my mouth; it was because I was scared to do so.
When was the last ti I saw her?
Not just physically but even in pictures or videos. I had deleted all of them.
Seeing her reminded of a part of myself that I had lost a long ti ago.
She also stared at . Even though I knew she wasn't real. Even though I knew she was a fignt of my imagination that had co to haunt in my nightmare, I wanted to touch her.
We stared at each other and slowly, I saw as tears ford in her eyes.
I couldn't soothe whatever pain she was feeling. I had no words to comfort her with.
As that first drop of tear trickled down her cheek, she opened her mouth with a question, "How could you?"
Another tear dropped on the other side of the face.
"How could you abandon ?" she asked, her voice ready to shatter into pieces.
She grabbed her face and with her nails, she began dragging it down, tearing up her skin. Her tears began mixing with her blood.
It wasn't real but I grabbed her hands and pulled them away.
"You left ... when I needed you the most," she muttered, her voice laced with anguish. "You turned a blind eye to my pain... to the tears I shed in your absence. How could you?"
No accusations earlier had impacted a single bit but the weight of her words bore down upon , threatening to push down into a state of emotions I had long abandoned.
"I never intended to hurt you," I whispered.
"Lies," she refuted.
"I an it."
She repeated again, "Lies," as she grabbed my neck with her hands and began squeezing. "Lie lie lie... that's all you ever do. That's all you are. A liar that abandoned when I was... when I was—"
It wasn't even her real self but she was unable to finish her words as if it would hurt too much to say.
She tightened her grip around my throat as she laid her head peacefully on my chest. The darkness had reappeared, closing in around us, swallowing the white space.
I couldn't find the strength nor did I feel like I deserved to push back further against her sharp words.
"I needed you. You were the one person I thought I could trust. I left my parents, I abandoned my old friends... I did all that for you," she said, tightening her grip so much that her nails dug into my flesh.
I could physically feel the pain and despite it being a dream, I didn't wake up.
"You should've never co into my life if all you were going to leave with was pain and suffering," she cried.
She lifted her head from my chest and with a final powerful squeeze, she said with a face full of tears, "I hate you... Asher. From the bottom... from the deepest pit of my heart, I hate you."
The intensity of the mont was both physically and emotionally suffocating. My breath was stolen away completely as she strangled with all the strength she was able to muster.
I looked at her as her body began becoming one with the enveloping darkness.
With no air in , I let out a weak, "Sorry."
As I jolted awake, my body was drenched in a sheen of cold sweat. With trembling hands, I wiped my forehead dry, each motion deliberate as I hid the evidence of the nightmare I was just in.
As I yawned, I stretched my sore arms.
"Finally awake," said Quentin Atwood, my brother's friend and the teacher he had recomnded. "How was your sleep?"
With a smile, I shrugged.
"What?" he said in disbelief. "You're telling that you don't feel any different?"
"Not really," I truthfully answered.
"What did you see?" he questioned, scratching his head in confusion.
"I just saw a few people from my past," I answered.
"And how was it?"
I thought about it for a second. At the mont, when I was standing directly in front of her, so of my abandoned old self had returned but now that I was back in the real world without her image here, all of that had disappeared once again.
"It was a fun experience," I said with genuine honesty.
"Fun? You're a weird one Bell," said Quentin. "You were ant to experience the worst nightmare possible. The purpose was to raise your emotions to an extre so that nothing else can impact you in comparison. Did you not enter the nightmare?"
I just smiled and told him, "Don't worry. It did its job."
His concern was never one to worry about in the first place.
I stared off into the distance and a thought appeared in the back of my mind which I quickly suppressed.
It said, 'What emotions?'
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