The Nightmare
It had been many years since she had last seen him, some minutes since she had thought about him. People often told her that things would get better once he left. They made it sound like a disease. Anyhow, it can be safely said that whether he lived in the same city as she did or not made little difference to her condition. Her condition, she believed, was utterly simple. It was transparent, to him, to the world, occasionally even to her. She was a burned down house. She was also the wildfire that had destroyed the house. Naturally if the condition one had was simply their soul, or their daft heart that refused to beat for itself, what power did anyone else have over, well, anything?
Macabre thoughts such as those that have been mentioned above had her trapped that morning. It was a damp Sunday and Johnny Walker had let her down last night. Four pegs of scotch assured her of dreamlessness until that night. In the early hours of that wet Sunday she had had a nightmare. He was there, sleeping next to her. She wasn't asleep or looking at him or anything. She was just appreciating his presence. The next thing she could feel was the hotness one would feel in their feet if fire melted their shoes and the melted shoes stuck to their skin. Wherever they were, that place was on fire.
Now, nightmares don't really have to mean anything as long as someone is burning or drowning or even both. Nightmares don't have to be rational. It is just that Sharon could not possibly accept that in her nightmare, he saved her.
Swayum sometimes thought of her. It was rare only because he feared its grip on him. He could not often wonder about Sharon because he could not save her. There was no way. She claimed scholarly how the only person who can save anybody is themselves. Yet every time he saw her he saw in her eyes, the mad wish to not save herself. Her filters had rusted. She withheld the good and the bad and the horrifying. She absorbed everything. She absorbed that he did not love her and that concoction of too-much-heartbreak and to-little-happiness acted on her like poison.
In the years that they were still exchanging telephonic birthday wishes, he noticed that she sounded brighter every year. She talked like she had had huge servings of Sunlight right before picking up the phone. Because he did not know of a way to be fair to her he led himself to think that she really was happy.
But if she were really happy what happened the previous year would not have happened.
They had stopped wishing each other on their respective birthdays now. He had just happened to see her at a bar in a city where they both didn't live. He was at the bar with his colleagues; she was at the bar with a tray carrying ten vodka glasses kept in front of her.
"Sharon," His voice gave way to the fact that it was an incredible, amazing coincidence.
"Swayum," Her voice gave way to the fact that the ten shot glasses on the table were empty.
"How are you, what are you doing here?" He first put his arm on her shoulder, and then thought it better to put it back in the left pocket of his jeans.
"I am in the pink of health and decided it was no fun, so I came here to get me some liver damage."
She turned in her tall stool to look at him. Even with her being seated in a chair that high he was taller than her. So she lifted her gaze to him, he realized that her eyes would need more intoxication to look any different from usual. They were big and probing. And the conversation that followed was between his words and her eyes until she said the following.
"I could not have looked at you like this sober."
After that she did not say anything to him.
Social conduct was weird, he thought. Having not seen her since graduation, it was odd of him to feel like he couldn't leave her alone like that. Having no idea how many nights before that one she had spent like that, it was odd of him to feel like she needed someone to be there with her.
She got up to leave, looking at him in a way she could only have in a drunken state. He offered to take her where she needed to go. She laughed. Just laughed, like his offering to take her anywhere was the most hilarious joke she had ever heard. The lighting in the bar, like the last one, and the one before that was bad, too little, almost not there, useless to keep track of drunk females from the past.
He followed her somehow. He insisted on getting her a cab. She refused with some more laughter. She kept walking and Swayum couldn't stop walking behind her because of that. Maybe where she was staying was not far. Staggering a little but okay otherwise, Sharon walked in front of him, for ten or fifteen minutes, occasionally laughing.
They were walking along the road. Safely, Swayum thought. He didn't know that he was wrong. Swayum was the guy who was usually right. Sharon was the girl who made little sense to anyone. That was the usual scheme of things in the days that were now ghosts. But he was as wrong as it was possible to be this time.
One minute she was walking two steps in front of him, and then somehow, instantaneously she shifted her movement to rabid running. Only she ran not ahead but sideways into a truck she had just spotted. Swayum saw the way she looked before running herself into that mammoth vehicle. She ran into it like a child runs towards an ice cream truck.
That is basically why he cannot often think about Sharon.
Them.
That there was a them in her dream was what really made it a nightmare. That it was a dream inside of a dream was what made her life one. She knew it all. She wanted to laugh at the irony that a nightmare inside a dream was. But she couldn't. For, if she could lift so much as a finger, the first thing she'd do was sit up and tell Swayum and her mother to stop discussing what had happened that night by putting a finger to her mouth.
They discussed what happened every time Swayum visited, once every month, she counted. She could count.
What happened, again, was simple, but transparent only to her.
She wanted to escape the bottomless well that her misery had become. One may ask now, why was she so goddamn miserable? Here's what had happened to her. There was a vast stretch of Something between Mad Love and Complete Indifference.
The side she was at was lonely.
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