People Say Many Things. However, The Truth Is Silent:
A Dream of Dread.
“I need to run, but I’m too horrified. I scream a question: Is it me you want? The war-god nods from his place crouched on my floor, like a predator, familiar yet features undistinguishable. As I scamper away pathetically, he grabs my ankles and pulls my feet out from under me. As soon as I land, I desperately kick him hard in the ribcage and shuffle just out of his reach. I leap to my feet, he matches my action, and I charge him violently, shoving him back against the wall where I slap him with my palm. He pauses, touches his bottom lip with his thumb and examines the blood that had poured from it. His eyes gaze moves from it to my eyes, smiling appraisingly. As if I did him right, made him proud. He then strikes me back, hard across the face, causing me to lose balance and swagger dizzily backwards. I tried to kick him as he prowls towards me, but he would have none of it. He catches me by the back of the head, pulling hair and ripping my slip, spins me around to face him. He slams me, not gently, back onto my bed. He crushes his body on and against mine hard enough that I might actually bruise, knocking the wind and will out of me.
…I lay under him inert and immobile. The deity slowly slides his hands down my arms, deliberately brushing his thumbs against the outer swell of my breasts. Leaving ice-cold sparks in their trail. He follows their curve to the middle of my ribcage then continued his descent, sliding his fingers down my waist, the tips of his thumbs just grazing either side of my belly button. I gasp for air, drowning as his power pours out from within him and douses my trembling frame in his omniscient malice. I gag on my own terror. He applies a slight pressure to my hipbones with his palms, sinking sharp nails into my hips, smiling when he hears the quick little sob burst from my lips. He then moves his hands toward my back, caressing the soft flesh of my bottom. He stares into my eyes the entire time...and I don’t look away. His hands settle momentarily on my upper thighs as he gently kneads at the clenched muscles with his chilled fingers. I discern myself being filled by his coldness, feeling it stuff me with a dead winter of apathy. I find I can’t recall where am I, my name, or why I was fighting this creature in the first place. I cannot remember happiness. I grit my teeth, abruptly filled with an anger. But strangely, not at this divinity holding me captive, but at everything else. My fingers fist and curl into the sheets of my bed, and he grinds his body into me harder, his hands continuing their descent, and I am overrun with the desire help him destroy something.
I know that I should retaliate, should kick him, should do something. But I cannot get my mind to clear. The way he so amorously caresses me, those hard-as-flint eyes sinking into my own, holding me trapped in their unbreakable gaze. Making me feel demented, enraged, mad. Whiteness frames my sight; all I see is him and nothing. I cannot conceive or recall existing outside this moment, outside his grasp. His hands are fleeting but rough, I note; not the kind of rough that comes from hard labor but the kind that came from excessive hunting. From excessive killing. His hands continued to travel down my legs, squeezing my calves as he passes them. He reaches my feet, then hooks the tips of his long fingers around my small ankles and breaks into a demonic grin, savagely pulling them back, and me to him. To be utterly devoured.”
A Dream of Covet.
“I’m searching for you. Caden Rye. Scraping nails down the road in pursuit of you. I crave your mouth, your voice, your chaotic hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. You are all I want, you alone can sate. Bread no longer nourishes me, dawn disrupts me. All day I hunt for the embossed reclusion of your gaze.
I hunger for your sleek, sardonic laugh. I want your hands to make a savage harvest of my flesh. I hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails to rake down my shoulder blades-I want to push lips against you and feel the delicate down of your skin like the soft give of a peach.
I want to capture those defusing sunbeams flaring from your lovely, slight body. I want to contain you, make you my insulator. My knight. I want to finger the sovereign cheekbones of your arrogant face. I want to touch the fleeting shade of your lashes.
So I pace around endlessly, famished, sniffing the heavy cloak of dusk. Hunting for you, for your hot heart. Like Andromeda clinging to her rock, waiting, eyes glued to the sky.”
A Dream of Loss.
“In that teetering seesaw between slumber and the dawning of consciousness, I see things clearly. I see what is true in that last-minute reverie before morning steals me away.
I see that although he does know it, Ryan fucks me so he can be close to someone. It’s changing. Love alters when alteration love finds. It is increasingly difficult for him to hold my hand, and he barely bring himself to verbalize those three words. He is no longer all smiles and dry wit like he used to be, funny and compassionate. He is a void. But his intercourse puts him in proximity to me. It presses his muscle and bones against mine and his body mistakes my soft figure for mind. I, on the other hand, am laying down dying for him. Every time I jack-knife my legs open, every time I say “I love you”-a voice wails that I’m sacrificing a little needed piece of what left of me, I give him a little more of me that he cannot return.
Ryan, not understanding that what he takes from me is torn from me, believes this new arrangement to be fair. He tries to treat me as beautifully as he once did: occasional kind words, an embrace or two, a kiss on the temple, and other empty gestures. He thinks I’ll mistake these gestures for kindness, but I know he can only feel nothing now. That they are hollow motions. Unfortunately, I am not lucid enough to stop what is happening to us; my dreams and blurred days drain me of all coherency. All I feel and know is that scratching, growing aberration inside me. And he is not attuned enough to understand what he is doing to me, that I’m sinking under the carcass of 'us'. I am falling in love; but I am trying to convince myself, force myself, that I am not. That I still love Ryan Doran. Who needs me and fully expects me to love him again once I come to my senses. But for right now, he is using the hours with me as a portal to his own need for propinquity.
But then I realize that I am not really dreaming. I am awake. An open-eyed nightmare. No beauty, no underlining meaning, or waking up sweaty but relieve or embarrassed. Just reality, stretching out endlessly before me like a treacherous sea.
And I am going to drown.”