By Jade Nice

There I am, laying in my bed staring blankly at the ceiling. As the lumps of dust turn to stars, I begin fading towards slumber. I am drifting further along into the darkness beneath my lids when I see her face. Her beautiful porcelain skin, bright blue eyes, and a smile so bright that it could light the entire night sky. Her scent lingers in the air, something short of vanilla and cinnamon. My love for her aches in my heart as though she were still here. The longer I stare at her, the more her appearance begins to change. The blue in her iris transitions to a black much similar to the color of tar. It leaks down her now sunken cheeks. Her skin is a dull pale color, her mouth as dry as sand. She smiles at me, and spiders crawl from within her mouth, scattering down her neck and into the darkness. She is no more.

I awaken. Scrunching my eyes, for the light shining on my face burns to my dermis like the essence of love.

My thoughts are racing, “One, two, one, two, on, off, off, on, no, yes, on, no, off.”

I begin to tremble, my bones becoming weak. I try to able myself enough to get out of bed. However, as I extend my legs from the mattress on my floor, I sense a feeling of faint. The room falls silent, the depth of it entirely gone. My knees quake and my mind then falls.

“Where am I?” I cry out at the utter nothingness before me. A salty taste of sweat is running down the head of my inflamed body. I rush into a panic, jumping to my feet, putting the flames of my thoughts out as fast as my mind can possibly do so. Searching my environment, everything looks the same, black. There is nothing but a red dot in the distance. Of course, I abide the space surrounding me, and investigate it. As I approach the light, I can now visualize a chair about five feet before me. In this moment I know all that I have done wrong.

Sol. That is the name of the sun. With the assumption that one does not know this, it is being told as a result anyway. This is only because, well, every person has separate wavelengths of thought which sends out their minds. The integrity of a thought lies beneath the sole purpose of one’s being. Here is what I mean: see, a person could look at him (Sol) as just another star in space; a floating blob of photons doing absolutely nothing in the middle of, what they may believe is, absolutely nowhere. Or said person may see him as an exploding array of beauty within the horizon of our sky after a long day. A Heaven, where the entire planet Earth, finds its way home by flying around him in awe.

The moon, her name is Luna. She glows in even the darkest of nights, the darkest of hours. She is the light at the end of a tunnel, and the most gorgeous shining beauty showering from the abyss. But someone, somewhere, may suppose she is not. That she is just a rock that lay out in an abundance of dark nothingness. You see, I am the second person within both of these exemplifications. I am ungrateful and I am unworthy.

The chair I am blankly zoned in on now rocks backward down a hallway, shattering on a door at the end. Nothing but a brown teddy bear lay in its place. Following the chair in good distance, I examined the walls. Picture frames line them all the way to the end. Within these picture frames is a young girl, who grows older and older throughout each image along the hallway. She mustn’t have a face, or else I am blind. For what I see is nothing more than skin.

Reaching the end of the hallway, the door is open just a crack. I reach out to reveal what is behind it, when I awake.

I am still. Incapable of moving my body, I lie paralyzed on my mattress. I can feel the wind from the darkened hallway caressing my skin. Coincidentally, this hallway is hidden behind the door that was open just a crack. Suddenly yet slowly, it begins to creak open. Trying to move my head into an upward position in which I am able to see, I can still make not a single gesture. My eyes begin to water as the door hits the wall. I recognize this room, but not as my own. A man with half a face torn off pounces atop of me. I attempt to scream, but my body does nothing but lay still, not even a simple flinch was made.

“I bet you think you’re pretty, don’t you little girl?” he whispers, his sweat dripping down on my face. I am now crying but I can not open my mouth for the whimpers to show their volume.

Wrapping his hands around my throat, my oxygen supply is cut off. Unable to breathe I am gasping for air, trembling beneath my skin, “Who am I? Where am I? Why is this happening to me?” the same thoughts rush through my head.

“One minute, two minute, three minute, four,” he scoffs at me in a disgusting laugh, “two, you’re out, and three takes the score.”

He reaches into his back pocket and begins to threaten me with a knife. When he slices my lip, the room fades to a darkness that I recognize from before. As I shift my head downward in the dark I see her, my love, lying in her bed with a strange man before her. She is no longer breathing. I watch as the man makes his way back down the hallway, my eyes following him to the end. The walls, I begin to notice are a familiar grey. Her door handle containing a single red light on the end of a string. Beside the wall sits a bear on a rocking chair. My heart beat begins to rage, for the walls are lined with picture frames. On one end she is young, to the next she is current. My heart again begins to ache, for I now know where I am.

I leap from my bed, sweating in terror. Scrunching my eyes, for the light shining on my face burns to my dermis like the essence of love. My thoughts are racing, “One, two, one, two, on, off, off, on, no, yes, on, no, off,” now  screeching, “turn it off!”

Closing the shades of my windows, I feel a sense of awareness. I stand still, in the middle of my room, for I just saw what the world had thought was a harmless death. Since she had been asleep for so long already, she was presumed to have passed peacefully in the night.

A frightening form of paralysis that occurs when a person suddenly finds himself or herself unable to move, most often upon falling asleep or waking up. This is is due to an irregularity in passing between the stages of sleep and wakefulness. Many people experience this in their life but never do they experience it through another person’s body.

I am now afraid that if I say a word, I will be the next to die. For there I am, laying in my bed staring blankly at the ceiling. As the lumps of dust turn to stars, I begin fading towards slumber. I am drifting further along into the darkness beneath my lids when I freeze, unable to move, dead awake.