Running Home (REWRITING)

Part 1

The nightmare is more of a night terror, because that's what it does it feels as if I might die from pain in my brain, I am desperately trying to wake myself up, screaming for help even when it comes IT never stops. I usually have a feeling that somebody is in my room, that maybe WICKD has somehow survived the explosion I had caused, that they had somehow drugged me without anyone knowing. Sometimes I wonder if this reality I'm living is real if this dream to be exact is real. Death wasn't kind. Thomas knew that. It snatched where it could, taking people who were far to young, far too good. It didn't pretend to care, it didn't pretend to distinguish.

The hooded vale of death had hung over the world for a long time always threatening. It had never touched Thomas quite so close. Death had ripped away apart of him, the part of him that was most loved.
Now Thomas would sit staring for hours. His face sunken and haunted, his mind cold and empty. The quicker the days went by, the more his friends seemed to die around him. Many were snatched away and the people who were left would wish it was them but there was always the main three. I've been asked several times now what it's like to watch someone die.
How it feels to stretch out and pull yourself into some kind of role as the ultimate escort. What goes through one's mind while you walk step-by-step, breath by laboured breath, to the edge.

People pose these inquiries from a place of soft-spoken curiosity. Or coolly, from some half-masked brink of fear. There's usually quite a bit of buildup; we slide about on an ever-so-casual, conversational tarmac, however sloppily. There's a careful, intentional warming, somehow necessary before we skid to a halt, their arms frozen in an off-the-cuff shrug, eyebrows cocked at the inevitable probe — "So . . . what's that like anyway?"
We approach — we crash, into the unanswerable. We free fall into the abyss.
Regardless of the context — of who or how or why it's asked — I lose words. I lose breath. I lose any ability to hold the question itself. It's too heavy, too insurmountable, too overwhelming and immense. It spills over the sides of us. It washes down the street, the present moment too weak to contain it. The images of the main three come to mind again chuck, the youngest and the most innocent Newt, the wisest and the one you could always rely on and Teresa, the one who betrayed us all but some how I know I will never stop loving then it ends. The dreams.

I wake as if it's an emergency, as if sleeping had become a dangerous thing. My heart beats fast and there is a buzzing in my brain and together they are as panic with jump-leads. Only now my brain is as a flat battery, the exertions of the night being a marathon of erratic problem-solving. And so this day will pass as if I am hungover, not from a drink, but from the nightmares that demand solutions or I'd be cold and collective keeping everything up not really wanting to let it all out and then I'd go back to a restless nights sleep.