On Last Night
Hannah Martinson
I had a dream about my grandmother last night. That hasn’t happened in a while. I can usually decipher between dreams and reality, and realize when I’m in a false world of my brain’s creation. There is no hesitation or confusion in regards to what is material and imaginary. But last night’s dream tricked my brain into pondering, even hoping, that reality mercifully disobeyed all of its principal laws and allowed me to see my grandmother once more. She stood before me as tangibly as ever. As real as I have ever known. I gazed at the wrinkles near her eyes and on her forehead that outline the stories of her life. I followed each one carefully, as I used to follow those stories as she used to recount to me as a child. Those extraordinary tales that generated from my tiny person such herculean emotions– joy, terror, grief. Every story, every wrinkle, was right there, five feet before me. The smell of her perfume permeated the room and everything inside it, my body included. Its sweetness eased my heart and mind, which raced against each other toward what seemed to be complete self-destruction, and allowed them to stop for a breath. Breathe in and out. In and out. I never want that smell to go away. I didn’t want any part of her to go away, not again, into an abyss of darkness and confusion and sadness. Please, don’t go away again. Her hands touched mine. I swear to you they did. She hadn’t gone away, not then. Instead she put my hands into hers and pulled me closer. Closer and closer until even the smallest sliver of doubt or fear would fail to slip in between us. She pulled me into an embrace that I remember, like a song you haven’t heard in years yet recall each lyric when it spontaneously plays over the speaker of a coffee shop. I remembered that hug like I remembered that perfume. I missed that hug, that perfume, those wrinkles, everything. I didn’t want to let any of it go. Stories eventually conclude and lines come to a stopping point. Perfumes wither into the stale air and their mask falls to reveal the unpleasantness they were needed to cover. Embraces draw to a close. As quickly as she returned, she vanished. My eyes opened to the darkness of my bedroom, which seemed much darker than normal, almost black. Readjustment took my body a few moments, but my mind has yet to follow suit. It will not allow for reality to set in again and extinguish the hope it so maliciously tempted me to reach for. There I lay in bed, as still as the darkness which entrapped me. I was indeed alone, and everything was indeed a dream. My mind, a Judas in its own right, had betrayed me. It allowed me to hope for the hopeless, to reach for the fruit I would never quite grasp. I lay alone in bed, afraid to return to sleep and subject myself to the same torment. Alone I was. Alone I am. Alone I fear I always will be.
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