Twenty-Nine
Esther finally falls asleep, and I am once again alone in the dark as time slows to a standstill. Alone with my thoughts and the emotions from whatever dreams dance in Esther’s head. The grief and loneliness that I always assumed to be my own are already drowning me—
“Wake up.” We whisper it together. I float to the bed to lie beside her, tracing the curve of her perfect, round cheek. “Please, look at me. Come back to me.”
Over the past year of haunting her, Esther’s sleeptalking has kept me clinging to sanity. I always thought she was parroting my thoughts to her, but perhaps I am the parrot. Maybe all of these thoughts, these whispers I echo, are from her, dreaming of me.
The guilt wracking me is my own, I know that; Esther cried herself to sleep, because of me. But the rest of this riot? There’s no end to my own emotions. The tangled mess of my heart blends into the flood coming from my East.
Squeezing my eyes shut as the tears escape from them, I pretend to be asleep, just like Esther had been for hours after our argument.
As always, she anchors my focus. Her deep even breaths, the rise and fall of her chest under her duvet in the dark room, are the closest I’ll ever be to sleep.
I wish I could go back to the dreamscape.
Not just to dream again, not just to actually touch her again, but to Untie myself somehow, like Dad said he tried to do.
To pull myself out of this cold, ghostly plane.
Grounding myself, I curl up alongside my East as soft snores and desperate murmurs escape her. Her heat is a scalding comfort, and I can’t help but lean into her.
I wish I could wake up on our cloud blanket again and wake up in the morning; I’d be in my body, not a spirit or a ghost or some intradimensional anomaly Tied to hers.
As I lose my ground, I sink deeper and deeper into her, until I can pretend the rise and fall of her chest is mine.
That I’m asleep and warm right alongside her, as I desperately long to be.
I wish I could give her the impossible. I wish I could go back and change everything.
I wish I could live again.