Kit
Scarlet streaks across the LA sunset like a splatter of blood.
This is the hour I both cherish and dread; the trembling line between sleep and death.
Between him and me.
The room sways, unmoored, like a boat on black water. Her sunlit profile forms behind my closed lids, clearer and sharper than ever. For once she’s still. Turned from me, but not running.
I blink away the dream’s edges, grasping the scratchy sheets to steady myself in reality. It’s been thirty-two hours since I’ve slept, and I can’t fight it much longer.
Fibres catch my bare soles with each step as I push to my feet and pace the rough carpet. My prescription bottle is tipped, spilling pink, blue, and white pills across the table like candy. I toss two stimulants into my mouth and swallow, hoping they’ll keep me awake.
Society treats sobriety like a straight line. But it’s not just avoiding the thing that hurt you; it’s surviving what made you reach for it in the first place.
Some days addiction blares louder than the music.
“I give everything,” I mutter to the empty room.
When I was twenty-one, the god said he’d make my dreams come true. I’ll be thirty-two in a month. I’ve spun in this reverie for over a decade now, and depending on the night, it’s more like a curse.
Dreams always have a price, don’t they?
I’d been warned, but he wove the cost into a beautiful lie. By the time I saw the truth, the price was paid in blood. People think the masked celebrity persona protects me. In a way, it does. But sometimes it feels welded to my skin.
I can’t tell where Judas of the band Somnium ends, and I, Kit from East London, begins.
He fills arenas; I can barely fill my lungs.
Yet I smile and nod time and time again, letting them paint me up and strap me into costume like a right pillock.
The strenuous tour I agreed to do this fall isn’t enough.
Now they want me to sign off on a documentary that will drag me further into the spotlight.
You enter fame a prisoner and leave a phantom—if you emerge at all.
Mattress springs creak like old bones as they dip beneath my weight. I reach for the glass on the bedside table. The water is stale, iron-tinged, like the pipes haven’t been cleaned since the eighties.
Lavender detergent clings to the bedding.
It’s meant to calm, but it never does. The duvet’s a proper shambles, hanging off the bed in a tangled mess.
I catch my reflection in the vanity mirror across the room.
Yolky-yellow strands are plastered to my scalp from sweat, and my eyes are blown-wide and bloodshot.
I’ve been out of sorts for weeks. Months.
Judas appears powerful. Kit looks like a bruised corpse.
The room tilts. I fall back into the pillows. Cinnamon-bourbon shampoo and sweat drench the cotton, the sickly scent nearly making me chuck it. Muscles locked, my body refuses to sit up. Shadows spill from the corners, thick as ink.
Lids heavy, they flutter like moth wings. I drag my nails across the sheets, grounding myself in the coarse texture. My legs twitch, then go slack.
That lavender’s fucking suffocating.
Sleep comes like a tide; slowly at first, then all at once. The god’s influence shifts my reality as I’m tugged away, claiming me once again.
She brightens as the dream forms, illuminating the edges of her curly hair and the round of her full cheek. A faint crease folds between her brows when she faces me, as if she’s trying to remember something important.
“Is it really you?” I whisper, though the words barely leave my lips.
Her mouth parts, her expression flickering like a candle about to blow out. She turns away, espresso-brown hair flying as she bolts. Reacting to an instinct that isn’t mine, I lunge forward, trailing her through the moonlit tangle of darkness.
“Wait!” I call, but the nightmare’s shadows devour the plea before it reaches her.
My lungs heave, and my pulse roars. I chase her through infinity, driven as though she holds the missing piece to a puzzle that’s been incomplete for centuries.
She never looks back.