Day 245 - Resurfacing - Chapter 1.1 (1238 Words)

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RESURFACING

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 1.1

There's that odd disconnect from reality, you know the one I mean, the one you feel when you just wake up. Your eyes fly open and you are awake, but you can barely register that you are because reality is not yet as real as your dream was. In a dream things are strong, fierce and underlined by the intensity of what you are experiencing in your mind. You are divorced from your other senses, sure but instead of that deprivation lowering the needs of your senses, it enhances them. Things are louder, brighter, stronger, softer, darker and weaker all together. Whatever you are feeling, sensing or experiencing the sensations are amplified by your sub conscious mind.
The twilight between waking and dreaming is a wasteland, a no man's land between heaven and hell. Purgatory then, the place you don't want to be but it's not as bad as the worst of it, but it's also no respite from the best of it. Whether the dreaming or the living is heaven or hell I could not honestly say while I was partially in either one of them it was the other that seemed to me to be diabolical in nature. Then of course I would settle and those feelings would dissipate. Reality would settle or the surreality of dreaming would overtake rational thought. Either way it was good there.
That is me now, in the state of purgatory and I would pay any tithe to regain my dream and go back to where I was, where she was. She was there, I know what I felt and who I felt the presence of, it was indelible and the mark it left was a burning tattoo of memory.
I can't reach for what is not here, even though my mind tells me it was my heart tells me the opposite. The feelings I have are a fraud and the thoughts the mask, not how I would see the world normally but this was not a normal situation now, was it?
Just out of reach I can feel muscles I don't have reaching for a feeling that was never really there. And a person who is long gone.
Long dead.
Deep breathing exercises, the panic attacks are long gone but the muscle memory for dealing with the unmanageable after effects of one, they have stayed with to support me like good, close friends. These things, these tools they know the worst of me like real people cannot, no one can get a glimpse of how it feels like she could have and like these steps that keep me, me, do.
The sound of air is a rasp, harsher than it should be, either cut to a jagged edge by the emotional chainsaw of memory or a cold is settling in. I'd prefer the brutal assaults of my emotional baggage over the flu virus. I don't want to be sick, I don't to dull who I am with drugs and I don't want to deal with phlegm, snot and the malaise that comes with the flu.
The edge I am standing on is dizzyingly high, as I come to my wakened state that vertiginous roller coaster is slowly rocking back to steady with me in the car at the rear, last to feel Andy changes, tail end Charlie, cracked like a whip.
I close my eyes and fall backwards onto the bed, wanting that unsettled feeling, the feeling of potential energy as I stand at the edge of the precipice. Potential energy is measured like conventional equations for kinetic energy, but instead of measuring the movement itself you measure the height and speed of the object under gravity, measuring what could be.
I can feel every unit and measure, and focussing on those allows me to feel the swaying as the floor beneath me wobbles and pitches about like a funfair ship moving through it's semi circular arc of centripetal force. It's swinging and swaying beneath my back and I give in to it's motion, trying to reclaim the slumber, the uncomfortable notion that I know I am heading back into a dream sits on my shoulder like a conscience wilfully being ignored.
“Are you...?” Her voice is back even if she is not, hollow and echoing it matches the tumbling feeling of lying here half asleep and half awake.
Lucid but dreaming.
“Uh.” I manage to say but I don't want to vocalise more than that, don't want to burst the bubble.
“Why are you swaying like that? What is that?”
“Bad dreams.” I said, but are they really that bad considering how much effort I am putting into getting back in their good graces?
An arm snakes and brings with it no lizard chill but a warmth over emphasised and tighter than the frame of her sixteen year old self could ever have mustered, she was not the sporty type, strength was not one of her strengths. That was her joke, she could not say it without cracking a smile no matter how many times it had been heard.
I crawl up into the embrace, knees to my chest, arm along my spine and head down looking at my toes. I have crawled back to the safety of … no wait, that's not my dream. It's too close and too confining here now and it's no longer an embrace, it's a prison.
Snap.
That was that, waking has transitioned faster than the soundtrack of the finger snap in my head.
This is real, but thankfully unlike the dreaming not too real to handle.
Now the follow on is a sob, which becomes sobs, the pain is the needle that burst the skin of the illusion and the rushing out of pressure lets loose a torrent of emotion contained within it's skin.
I feel no embrace, I feel no movement, I feel nothing.
I feel nothing again.
Recovery is good, but chewing off and spitting out the poison leaves you empty afterwards. Sure it was bad for you, poison by definition is very, very bad for you. There's a clue in the name itself, it's not hidden because we all know what it means from a very early age. I understand those people who have lost a limb or are addicts to some slavish substance or humanity. It is a part of you and when its gone you notice it's gone.
You miss it.
I miss it.
“Tell me.” Her voice asks and after all I have been through in the last minute I don't question her presence in my waking thoughts, the void that was left by her was now filled again. Don't question it, don't question her, instead provide answers.
“I can't”
“You can.” She's right, I need to and I will but even the resemblance of resistance is saving face in my own mind.
“I missed you.”
“I don't see how, I was never gone, you've always known I was here? What's the point of missing something that never left? You're like a little child missing things on the potential of them going, even when they are right in front of you.” Her voice chides me but I can hear her contrary smile beneath her words.
“I'm not a child.” I grumble in a low voice.

She mocks me back with childish pitch. “I'm not a child!”