Sleep would be welcomed, should be, if I didn’t know what it
brought. Stay awake, I tell myself, stretching wide my exhausted eyes in the dark. Just three more hours
till I throw back blankets anyway, just stay awake, stay awake.
Even when I need to, I won't sleep. It’s too heavy, and my body too dense. Motionless. Nearly dead between my lace-trimmed sheets, trapped in a sleep-paralysis brought on by nightmares. Not the cat-and-mouse chasing dreams of childhood, no, these are a
different sort of ‘mare where the faceless dead come and whisper
on my neck. Where they lead me by hand through dense forests of brush, fog, and trees whose ancient bark is abrasive against my ankles, whose bark removes pieces of my skin as I struggle through their maze. In these dreams the dead come, one at a time, and turn their backs to the sun to reveal to me their shadowed faces. They direct me toward motes to
row across, and riverbeds lined with stiff black plants for me to walk through. These are my dreams. No dinosaur, no
monster to tear me apart; just the stiff fingertips of a baby brushing mine in a creek
bed.
And that rock, that fucking rock. That anchored, stubborn
rock. Large enough to keep only one alive against the rising water; that kept me alive, held me just above the breaking,
raging whitecaps on the gray sea.
They’re all gone.
Every last one. Swallowed whole by the slippery, storming
water. And I, with squinted ocean-stained vision and a mouth stretched wide, black haired and naked, bearing only my chest above water, was
good for nothing. Not one rescue. It’s coming for me, too.
I am soaked. Black strands catch in my open mouth, over the
slope of my nose in a wicked, whipping way – the hand of the wind turning my
own body against me.
It’s coming for me too.
But still I wait belly up on my rock, my lungs stretching, expanding, sucking in air and salty water together. Almost completely submerged now, the air that touches my chest is cold and I want to scream into the rain,
but I only think instead, “he was just a boy. Just a boy. A tiny, tiny boy.” He
smiled at me once, all teeth, large and white, gleaming. He was just a boy.
It will take me soon, too.
But, as ever, I wake in my final moment. And I remember the fingers. The baby's fingers, the boy’s fingers, the old woman's fingers. My chest is still raising in resistance to the storm, cold but no longer wet and bare. The angry surge in my belly that wanted to
cry out the names of all the lost, of all the faceless and formless ghosts that
linger in the crevices of my face, is still there but
there are no names suitable so instead I cry, hiding under my white lace-trimmed
sheets. Guttural sobs, exhausted sobs – those are their names.
This is why I don’t sleep.
This is why I can’t look at them directly, only a
little to the side.
I cannot row this far.
It has come for me.
