aki /capitol

I don’t remember much but there is the dream.

Rose says that’s normal after the sort of trauma I’ve been through. He says that sometimes, our brains take the things that burn us and bury them deep to protect us from the pain.

I guess my life was just pure torture until now because I don’t remember shit.

But the dream is there, it comes and goes like a tide, here one night, gone the next, lapping at my conscious, always just a little out of reach.

I dream that there is a blade through my chest.

I dream that I am bleeding out, or that I would be if I had anything left to bleed out; in the dream I’m always empty.

Then I fall, but I don’t land where I should. Instead I’m swallowed whole into a vast darkness.

It’s not a bad dream, I’m never afraid, I don’t wake up in the night covered in sweat.

In the morning I’m just a little bit sad.

Like a child, holding the fragments of his shattered toy with the cold clarity that he’s broken it himself, that this pain is his own fault.

I sit there in the early morning light, hands loosely cupping the fleeting remnants of a broken memory even as the dream spills from my grasp and fades. Lachland’s back is warm against my thigh. They’re a restless sleeper, never where I left them when we finally dropped off the night before but I don’t mind, their movement never wakes me.

But the sun does, rising slow, I should really shut the blinds at night.

There’s something about waking with the dawn that feels right though. It never seems to bother Lach anyway, who always crawls wearily into bed just a couple hours before it rises. Even though I lie there with my eyes shut, they know I’m still awake and they burrow into my side like a strange dog.

Then I can finally sleep.

And I dream of the blade in my chest and the dream grows against the back of my eyes, morphing around me as I fall into darkness and the feeling comes then, of being held.

It must just be Lachland, snaking their arms around me, holding me in place as I scratch at my own chest in the dark but it’s different, the feeling is so absolute, so empty that somehow it’s full.

It’s sadness, cupping me in her hands, letting me spill through the cracks in her fingers, such absolute sorrow, more pain than one person can handle in a lifetime.

I open my eyes and there’s Lachland, face so close to mine that I breathe in their exhale and I know that it doesn’t matter what I remember and what I don’t. That first night when I woke up in that hospital bed, lost and unnamed, the only other bed in the room was empty and there was this heaviness pressing down on my body.

Lachland was sitting on me, arms crossed, that look on their face they get when my mouth twists in the wrong way.

”You were digging at your chest in your sleep,” they’d said.

I don’t need to remember a life before them.

I don’t want to.