Shut Up & Listen

the check up, outro (finale)

"You said you were running so fast that you tripped. You tripped and you fell down the stairs. But instead of hitting the bottom, you just kept falling and falling even after the stairs were long done. The path became a dark nothing as you continued to fall and you felt weightless and heavy all at once. You said that your heart felt like was filled with air or water and you couldn't breathe and you felt like you were going to die just before you woke up." He nodded. "You remember what I said to you?"

"I asked you, I said, 'do you know why you woke up?' And you said no. Do remember what I said to you?"

I did remember, but I couldn't speak.

"Do you remember what I said to you?" He asked again, getting impatient. He asked again. Then, two more times. His eyes were growing wide and he was getting closer to me but farther away and it felt just like the dream he was talking about. I could feel myself slipping away, falling farther and farther way from him and Jemaika and Dame whose voices I could still hear distinctly.

He was yelling now. He'd stopped asking the question and was now saying something different that I could barely make out. Once I heard it, he said, "COLE. You have to wake up before you die!"

He told me that if I die in a dream, I will never wake up. The trick is to always wake up before you die. He was frantic. I could see it in his eyes that like me, he was trying everything he could to move, to run, to wake up— but, he never woke up.

Sounds were mixing in my head. The more I tried to move, the more voices I heard. It was Jemaika and my pops. Dame and Jill. Foreign voices I've never heard before. There were beeps and footsteps, many of them. I heard shushing and weeping and that voice again. "Cole, wake up before you die." Because if I die while in this dream, I'll never wake up. I gotta wake up.

I could feel myself slipping back to Jemaika's room. I closed my eyes and tried hard to focus on waking up. But instead of waking up, I was in another dream. I was back at the loft.

I hear my father's voice clear as day. I remember this moment. I was eighteen. This was the first time I'd ever waken up and remembered what I had dreamt. I was so psyched I ran to the front room where he was sitting in his green chair. He loved that chair. I could always find him there. "Dad!" I yelled.

Before my suicide attempt just two years before, I'd never called him that. It was Mr.Adenbanjo, doc, sir and whatever other respectable titles I could think of- never dad, not even pops. I was still holding on to the idea that I had real parents out there. Around this time, I had begun to give in to the fact that he was my father and Adjoa was my mother. They were my real parents.

It wasn't even a good dream. It was scary. I was so fucking scared. I said, "Dad!" He looked up and zipped his little pouch, tucking it between the cushions as he did back then— before he thought I knew anything. "What's going on, son?" He chuckled.

I used to love it when he laughed— even when he smiled. His eyes sparkled like stars in the darkest of nightskies. He always looked so happy. "I just had a dream." I said, sitting on the couch across from him.

"Oh yeah?" He asked, intrigued. He was always much more interested in things like this after he'd indulged in whatever he was keeping zipped up in that pouch. That pouch that i'd unzipped many times finding it fully stocked, always. I had started stealing from it not too long before this day. When he found out, he never said anything to me, he just stopped hiding the pouch. Eventually he stopped using the pouch altogether; he just left them in the main bathroom so that we both could get to them easily. "What happened?"

"I was falling," I laughed, even though just moments before I was shocked out of my sleep with a rapid beat in my chest and a sweaty pillow. "I was walking down this hallway. I saw a couple of friends and they went down the stairs before I could get their attention so I followed them."