Shards of Kairos

I - The Fog

Evie dreamt of fog.

The dream was always the same. A room. The depth of which seemed endless and infinite and no matter how long she walked through the room and the fog - it never ceased. It never quit. The fog chilled her, brushing against her skin with an eerie sense of life. Of presence. As if Evie was surrounded by something that wanted her. To pull Evie deeper into the endless void of fog, beckoning her towards whatever it was. Calling to Evie to join it, to keep walking endlessly and to never leave the whispers of what it seemed to offer.

And what that offer was exactly Evie didn't know, she never had. Sometimes it just seemed to want something. It seemed to want her. And sometimes when Evie dreamt of the foggy room there was a lingering sense of 'someone else'. That Evie wasn't alone. It was an indescribable feeling, a nameless presence that was as ghost-like as the eerie, nearly translucent fog itself.

Other times - Evie felt deathly alone. As if she was the only one in the world and there wasn't another soul to be had in whatever realm this was. And that loneliness threatened to consume her until she awoke, gasping, desperately craving the knowing of another person, another presence, anything at all.

Just months ago, before Evie had moved into her own apartment, the dreams had driven her to her parents' bedroom if only just to see for herself that she wasn't alone. To ease the agonizing sense of isolation until she could breathe again and assure herself that she wasn't the only one left alive on the entire planet.

In the dream, there was never anything in the room but fog and in any direction she walked - the almost opaque walls stretched before her, endless, always a considerable distance out of reach, at just the edge of her vision in all directions.

Sometimes Evie ran, most times she walked. Endlessly it seemed, for hours Evie would try one or the other. Sometimes she'd wake up exhausted, as if she'd actually done just that the entire night. Ran. Through the endless, expansive void of fog and desolation.

This morning was no different.

Evie woke up in a cold sweat, sitting upright in bed in a rush of wakefulness. Like coming up from the deep side of the lake at the family vacation home that her family stayed at most summers, especially when she'd been younger. She'd always loved to go swimming in that lake. To dive as deep as she could until she found the coldest spots, escaping the summer heat under the tranquil waters.

Waking from 'the dreams' were much like surfacing from that lake. Sudden. Sometimes overwhelming. Like coming up from the other side of another world.

Evie had started having the dreams months ago, maybe a year now. The dreams had never really changed and sometimes they happened even four or five times a week. How she'd kept up with her school work in her senior year of high school, her studies, and with all the pressures of her parents she had no idea. Lord. Was she relieved that high school was entirely behind her now.

Sometimes Evie was so tired that the only thing probably keeping her upright was an endless stream of coffee and the occasional energy drink. And moving out into the real world, getting a job, and avoiding college only added to the stress. And more stress meant more dreams. And now - nearing her twenty second birthday - both her mother and her father's pushing for a whole list of colleges and universities was reaching it's near frenzied peak.

At first Evie had just a limited amount of options being shoved at her because they had 'standards' that she generally didn't share. But then they'd gotten desperate and were now throwing anything at her that they thought she might like.

Evie had been accepted into most of the top universities and colleges in the country, that wasn't the issue. School had always come pretty easy to her (except for her almost laughable attempt at home economics) and she'd enjoyed school. But more often than not the dreams had made it hard. Either by exhausting her or putting Evie in a perpetual waking fog - pun intended. That and constantly worrying about her sanity and if the real reason she was adopted was because her biological parents had been mentally unsound and hadn't been able to keep her - always lingered in the back of Evie's mind.