When I wake up, I am Alone.
There is a little girl with flowing blonde hair, dawned in button-up pyjamas, rocking me in my sleep from her movement on the top-bunk.
Her front teeth jut out from her plump bottom lip; eyelashes brushing to and fro from the gentle breeze passing through the window ajar nearby.
A soft moonlight is buffered by the straight sheer curtain yet still bleeds out around the edges onto the bright blue walls.
The familiarity frightens me, in a way unsettling and brimming with sentimentality.
Those bright blue walls, dawned with Sponge-bob iconography, are a stark comparison against the new white shine and accompanying fluffy grey carpet.
The congregation of mold has been washed away into unexistence; yet, the windows still remain slightly ajar to negate the damp.
When I stare up at the rusted metal bars - standing like an iron lung, expelling rasps and groans with movement - I have this foreboding feeling that nothing has changed. And it sits there, a brick in my stomach until it begins to migrate and slip through the fingers of my insides like Oobleck.
I start to question if it was the wine. I lost count after the 4th glass - it was easier to not keep count and let my head decide my repercussions when the morning broke through the clouds - but I’ve been better at holding my stomach against poison recently, and I intend to keep that up.
Does the blonde-haired girl feel it too? Does she hold on to the knowledge that time doesn’t change circumstance? That 10 years isn’t a long time to grow-up? Does she hold onto that innocence like I try so hard to?
And the last thought I tend to sit on, pick it up with me when I stand so to hide it behind my back and disgard it when nobody is looking. Would she be happy?
I can’t hear my dad flipping through the T.V channels downstairs, designating his down-time to deciding on a show ‘worth his time’, so I throw a podcast on my phone and place it under my pillow to emulate the space.
My dreams are as vivid as ever.
When I close my eyes, I see vast oceans and skies, my friends and family, arcane jungles and wilderness begging to explored. I see the bizarre and the mundane, I see images I cannot explain, I see everything.
When I wake up, I am Alone.
- Em