Shake Me Awake

I used to have vivid dreams. Hallucinated landscapes where I could feel sensations so real there were times I was unable to tell what was a dream and what was reality. If I pricked my finger, the pain was sharp and dull, throbbing as the blood warmed my broken skin. Rarely did I have nightmares, and I considered myself lucky to have such lucid dreams.

Then I got sick. Really sick. The kind of sick an eighteen-year-old doesn't and shouldn't get. A sickness had manifested itself into a vital pair of my organs, and suddenly I was popping twenty pills a day just to keep my body going. Leashed to a machine during the night to keep me alive. I swelled, gained weight. Stopped swelling, lost weight. Veins busted, body scarred. Filled out, hollowed out.

I've always been a strong person, unfazed by most things. I used to stand tall and flip my thick mess of tight curls behind my shoulder. My favorite feature. When I realized the disease was taking that too, evident by the clump of hair staring back at me from my palm, I threw up.

I used to love to dance with ballerina legs in the secrecy of my room, an impossibly painful feat now. Muscles destroyed from the medication, my body dangerously skeleton like. I stumble and fall, rueful at my newfound clumsiness.

I have never experienced depression, but suddenly its bitter aftertaste filled my throat like saltwater, drowning me. I was a cup, brimming with liquid but never quite spilling.

My precious dreams manifested themselves into dark apparitions after my diagnosis. Fitful nightmares where my doctor curls his fingers around my throat, squeezing as I turn red and gasp for air.

“You’re killing me,” I choke out, clawing at his hands.

“You’re doing it to yourself,” he responds with a frighteningly blank expression, his eyes devoid of emotion.

Now I no longer dream. With the acceptance of what happened to me came a blackness that I cannot describe. My mind is empty with consciousness.

Many nights I do not sleep at all. These nights I feel my chest constrict and my eyes well with tears. A gasping comes deep within my throat, and then I am reaching out with trembling hands into the darkness of my room, grasping at the air uselessly trying to ground myself.

“What are you doing?” I choke out, pulling my heart out of my chest and crushing it in my hands. “Stop.”

Some nights, when the world is silent, my room begins to suffocate me. My tears fall in large glistening drops onto the carpet, and my throat feels like I've swallowed cotton. Stifling sobs, I stumble out the door and down the stairs, the night air filling my lungs.

I run through the darkness, barefoot and thinking of nothing. It is bitterly cold and entirely dangerous at this time of night, but all rationale is gone as my feet slap the asphalt.

I’m racing against my emotions, lungs squeezing painfully as I’m determined to be the victor. I run from the sadness and the self-pity, sprinting across the street, ignoring the traffic lights. I hurl past buildings, away from the questions of “why me?” and empty wishes to undo time. If I’m fast enough, I can even outrun the anger which reaches for me, trying to crawl up my neck in a whisper of heat. I reach the outskirts of the street, just barely escaping the feelings of denial, heaving and gasping for oxygen.

I stand in the empty street for a moment, listlessly staring at the ground. The silence is deafening. I turn, walking back through the darkness.

I think back to when I was not leashed, not relying on others to bathe me, not a fall risk, not a statistic. I wonder if I will ever dream again, dancing through my mind with ballerina legs once more. This time, I have no tears left to shed.