Suicide of Dreams

It still seemed strange after so many times to wake up from being someone else. So it felt, was there no other way to describe, no that still seemed the best. Yet tonight with my heart bursting adrenaline and a panicked laugh trickling soft as tears from me while the thunder sounded inside and out. What was that noise, there, in the wall. The faint thrum. Pulse, pulse, pulse. Just my heart in the distance. Deep music of the city.

I sat up in bed. The quiet returned to me and a dry throat came with it. Parched. Dreams they seemed at first, yet the shadow of blood remained in the corner of my eye on the skin of a clenched hand. Tightly it gripped the handle of a knife. Did grip. Hadn’t it? It felt so. Sickly I rose and floated to the shower, socks drifting in the calming caress between my flesh and the floor. I washed myself. The water wailed through me and crashed about my head and with a deep breath I expelled the thought of puncturing my soft body repeatedly with steel. Wherever I went when I slept, whoever I became, I had no idea. Different every time now wasn’t it. And not always so bad as tonight. Tonight I had murdered.

Yesterday, what was it, I cried into the tufts of a huge dog because my grandmother died. Me, allergic to dogs, didn’t own one and my grandmother died long ago. The night before, ten again but a boy playing by a river with his dad blowing through reeds pressed between his thumbs while they fished.

Dreams they were, or so was said. I no longer seemed sure. So many people I had become. And now as I washed the feeling of a murderous sleep from my skin, I felt sure that somewhere a man with guilty hands washed blood from himself as well. What would he do with the clothes? The blue button-down and silky yellow tie, the gray slacks. Dispose of them to be sure. But the pleading fear and the screams left in his mind, the image of his reflection in his wife’s dimming eyes. What with those?
Suicide is a one way street.