“There was blood and someone was chasing me!”

Those might be your nightmares, but I’d rather write about when someone I love has a nightmare. Like when my girlfriend wakes, confused and unfocused.

Her eyes look at things all around her that are still in that other world. She visits for a while, but always comes back.

It usually happens in the early morning hours and it’s worse if she’s been working long days.

The night’s always in a place where things are colored only by different shades of blue, when the sound of the world mirrors the sound of massive oceans rushing into a yawning, painfully circular abyss.

It’s so sudden, always. She sits up and inhales sharply like she’s just remembering how to breathe.

It’s impossible not to wake when she does. Even when she’s not having nightmares, I wake when she does.

“Hey, hey. Everything’s okay. I’m here.” Sometimes I touch her, sometimes I don’t. She never fights being held, but I can never hold her gaze and she never speaks. She’s still away somewhere, distressed.

So soon, she lays her head back down on her dinosaur-patterned pillow and we’ll fall asleep. Because I fall asleep when my job is done, and my job is done when she falls asleep.

They used to scare me, these little fits. But she’s quick to sleep and quicker to love.

So these are the nightmares I think about. And I’m glad knowing that she never remembers them in the morning.