Lilly

It’s a slow night. I stay up late for no reason. It’s good at first but later it gets kinda bad. I’m tired beyond belief but every time I go to sleep I risk having another one of those dreams. The ones that don’t seem horrific until I half wake up and my head is still stuck in dreamland but my body is stiff as a board in my bed, filling up with a sense of impending doom like someone switched on a faucet in my brain. And the thing is they really aren’t that bad, just weird, but I always come back to life with that feeling of panic, and I hate that. I can’t stand losing control.

I could be doing something with my time spent awake. I have friends to text and grocery lists to make and clothes to pack. But here I am, reading back the half-gibberish summaries of these dreams. I wrote them all while still in that weird headspace where you’re groggy as hell from sleep but your skin is crawling and your heart’s beating so fast. Maybe you were running in the dream. Maybe you were in pain. Maybe it’s best if you don’t remember.

I find my resolve. I meditate—maybe that will stave them off for the night. I switch off the lights. I go to sleep.

It’s a dark morning. I didn’t dream and that much is a blessing. The house is already empty and outside my window the rain is coming down hard. It could be the last day of peace like this before I leave home, so I lie in bed and listen to music. It’s good and this time it doesn’t just get worse from there.

I took this personality quiz recently (because what’s more fun than the internet generating vague descriptions of your subconscious that would be applicable to nearly any living human being?!) and one of the defining traits it listed for me was resilience. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Over the past couple of years I’ve gone from my lowest to my highest and back again so many times that my head spins just thinking about it, but in the end I’m still here. For nearly 18 years I’ve fought those lows and I’ve won every time, and maybe I’m just at a high point right now, but I’m going to cling to it, no matter what it takes. Nightmares be damned. ♦