The River of Dreams
Thia—Now
My dreams always fall into one of two categories: before, and after.
The before dreams are the happy ones. A little girl—dark hair, wide smile—standing in the doorway of a cottage.
Her parents are there with her. It feels like another age entirely.
The Middle Ages, perhaps—I can't say when, and I’m not sure where.
They speak a language I don't know, yet somehow I understand enough. There is love in that house.
The mother is gentle but distant, as though part of her is already elsewhere. The father’s hands are rough and calloused, and when he looks at the little girl, his eyes shine with a devotion so fierce it almost hurts to witness. I can feel it—the weight of his love, steady and certain.
It is a simple life. A warm one. But something terrible happened to that family. I never see it. I only feel the shadow of it creeping closer, inevitable as an approaching winter.
The after dreams come more often than the happy ones. They always leave my chest aching for reasons I can't put a finger on. It is the same woman—the mother from the cottage—but she is alone.
She searches for someone. Or something. She is no longer the woman who baked bread and mended clothes by the fire. The little girl is gone. The broad man with the calloused hands and gentle smile is gone. Whatever warmth once filled their lives has been stripped away.
I don't see how she lost them—I only know that she did. In these dreams, I watch her move through life—or something like life—stronger than she once was. More powerful. And utterly broken.
She doesn't age. Centuries turn around her like pages in a book, yet she remains unchanged—young, beautiful, untouched by time.
People watch her the way I do—drawn in, captivated, unable to look away.
But unlike me, they can reach her. They can touch her.
Speak her name. She sees them, studies them, uses them.
Bends them gently—or cruelly—to her will.
I am just a shadow that trails behind her, unseen and unheard. I try to reach her. I try to call out, to warn her, to beg her to turn around. But there is something between us—a thin, invisible veil. I press against it and feel nothing but distance. She moves through the world like I don't exist.
Maybe I don't.
Circumstance turned her into something else—something that feeds on the blood of living. Not exactly like the beings in the vampire books I read as a child, or the silly things we see on television. Sunlight does not burn her. She casts a reflection. She doesn't sprout wings or dissolve into mist.
She is fast—terrifyingly so. And strong. And sometimes she kills.
When she does, she knows the evil in her victims. I feel it too, as though her judgment lives somewhere inside me. As though her vengeance belongs to me as much as it does to her.
People see her beauty but miss her intelligence. They never notice how perceptive—cunning—she is. She can slip into a mind as easily as a room—draw out secrets, bend will, make her prey kneel without ever raising her voice.
In the after dreams, her lives are rich—rich with purpose, with power, with rooms larger than any she had ever dared to enter before. As though death was the doorway to everything she was never meant to have.
But these lives are empty of love. And beneath the power she wields, beneath the elegance and control, her heart still aches for what she lost.
I feel that ache as if it were my own. When I wake, the details of her face begin to dissolve. They melt at the edges first, frost beneath sunlight, until only the barest bones remain—dark hair, a slender build, the memory of graceful movement that can, in an instant, become something terrible.
I try to hold on to her, but sand sifts through my fingers. I am certain her face—the first detail to go every time—contains the answer to something I am missing.
My psychiatrist told me to keep a journal beside my bed.
The pen and paper are always there. The moment my eyes open, I reach for them and write frantically—anything I can salvage.
Impressions. Fragments. The shape of the story before it scatters.
Most mornings I have less than a minute before it all unravels into nothing.
I have had these dreams for as long as I can remember.
The journaling came later—only the last ten years or so.
Now I have stacks upon stacks of notebooks filled with these fragments.
Their covers are bright and harmless—hummingbirds, butterflies, impressionist landscapes—images that lie about the darkness and loss inked across their pages.
That is all I truly have—fragments. They became fuel for my writing. What began as a way to keep the dreams from swallowing me whole followed me to university and became something else entirely. “You have talent,” they told me. “You have a gift for storytelling.” So I wrote.
This has been my life for as long as I can remember. Sleep. Dream. Wake. Forget. Until this morning.
This morning, the dream did not fade. I remembered it, clear and whole inside my mind.
All of it. Every last detail…