Dead Awake: 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 on the threads of my black v-neck with a chandelier plastered on the breast, 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. For she is the architect of my mind. I am held in captivity behind the bars of the prison she built for me when she disappeared.

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. Examining 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, a bear sitting idly upon its seat. At this moment I now 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 send 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 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 with 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 feeling the wind from the darkened hallway caressing my skin. Coincidentally, this hallway is hidden behind the door that I approached, though, it was still opened 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 of his face torn off pounces atop of me. I attempt to scream, but my body does nothing but remain a lump of inanimate clay, 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.

“What do you got to offer honey?” his fingertips caress my face, following the outline of my jaw.

“Hhmm” he scoffs.

He reaches into his back pocket and begins to threaten me with a knife. When he slices my lip, a tear rolls down my face like a ball, I wish to chase it as though I were a dog obeying the wishes of my owner. He begins wrapping his hands around my throat tighter and tighter until my oxygen supply is cut off. I am gasping for air, trembling beneath my skin. His breath, a scent of garlic and eggs sends a gustation of disgust through every cell of my taste buds.

“Who am I? Where am I? Why is this happening to me?” the thoughts play on a continuous loop inside my head, something similar to a record player repeating the same tune for what feels like hours. He grins the nastiest grin my vision has ever perceived, so I propel my body out of the bed I lay suffering on. My leg makes a spontaneous move in the formation of a roundhouse kick. This sends my attacker to the wall, where I continue to defend myself with a wooden plank I must have gathered from the floor of my bedroom. My hands grip it tightly while my arms swing in a sideways projection causing the plank to collide with his face, resulting in him collapsing to the floor, unconscious.

I freeze, my mind in a flutter, over-analyzing every single action I’ve just made. The one thing that came through, clearly depicted was the word, “Run.” So I did. I ran, my feet as heavy as the weight that was placed upon me as the man set foot in the room. When my first foot reaches the pavement on the street I cry so abundantly and obnoxiously I begin to wake the neighbors. I find myself in safety as I fall into the arms of a man, the shirt he wears is scentless, a black v-neck with a chandelier plastered on the breast, this is familiar to me. As I gaze up I recognize this man as no other than myself.

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, paralyzed. I watch as the man makes his way 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. Her eyes widen as he creaks the door open to release his horrible image upon her eyes, she whimpers. As he places his hands upon her throat, her gaze shifts in my direction, the life in her eyes fading out as fast as she does. Her body vanished, as though it were surreal. But to where? I scream in agony, “Let her go! What are you doing?” his head snaps into place in a position to face me.

A whisper shuffles through the earey silence, it said very distinctly, “sisylarap.” A grin covers the side of his face that is still in tact when 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. I climb out of bed, my head spinning. Closing the shades of my windows, I feel a sense of awareness when it hits me, “paralysis.” I stand still, in the middle of my room.

I love her. I love her more than I can ever recall loving a figure in my entire life. Her disappearance has affected many people, but none enough to continue searching hereafter. It has been years, and she has been presumed to have been ghosted, never to have been dead from the start. Because there was no proof of kidnapping or murder, there was no investigation to determine the cause of her disappearance. I could describe to you the way the sky bends in the moments in which it’s about to fall, and afterall, I could have done something, something to save her. I should have tried to get her to come home with me the night we last spoke. I could have called, anything. I could have moved, but she was frozen. 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 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 have, and I have discovered things that not a single person has ever spoken of.

I am now afraid that if I say a word, I will be the next to die. I frighten myself on a daily basis due to the fact he broke his neck with a crackling sound of bone-to-bone contact in order to give me a sense of what comes next. So every night, I go to bed, hoping, praying that tonight won’t be the night, but here 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.