𝐈𝐍𝐅𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 // 𝐃𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝

An Inch Too Far Away

"Oh. Must be my ears playing tricks on me." I lied limply.

"Must be." His tone was unconvinced.

Splash. Louder this time. Much, much louder, much clearer.

"I swear I just heard it!" I exclaimed, bewildered. George shook his head sadly, his expression concerned, smile forced. Putting a hand on my shoulder, he exhaled.

"You must be hearing things. Come on, let's keep going." And he continued leading me down the path. I glanced over my shoulder once more before sighing and giving up. Looking for a sound was a futile effort, something fruitless and ineffective. I guess I just had to deal with the background sounds. But they bothered me, burying themselves in an uncanny little place in my heart.

Splash. Splash. Splash.

An image of a roiling sea flickered before my eyes. An image of a spindly, dilapidated metal bridge. An image of a cold hand stretched out. An image of dark, heavy clouds pouring with rain. An image of a lash of lightning, jutting out of the clouds. An image of a massive ripple in the water, followed by crests of foamy white lace spewing upwards like a volcano's magma.

And sounds. So many sounds.

The clap of the thunder, the drumming of the rain, the roar of the wind, the crash of the waves, the creak of metal. A single shattered scream, piercing and broken. A single sob, defeated and fragmented. A single mutilated breath, shuddering and weak.

A single splash.

Splash.

Suddenly, everything I saw around me in the real world reminded me of the images that were lazily scrolling through my mind. It was like a grim cinema, with me chained and tied to the front seat, my eyes steeled upon the screen without any way of moving away.

One image was like a film, half-opaque as it layered over the collection of mental snapshots, mental polaroids. Wisps of colour from my surroundings bent and painted themselves onto this picture.

Grains of sand smoothed and warped into strands of long, wavy, wet hair, plastered to the edges of a porcelain-pale face. Long shadows bent into long, dainty eyelashes, fanned up against slightly lavender eyelids, other shadows bending into two raised eyebrows. The crashing blue waves tinted green as they formed into two eyes, flecks of gold and hazel drawn from the sun and sand and forming in brown rings around the jade-green irises. A sky-blue hue presented itself in the green.

Pain was ice-cold as it wound around my gut, around my heart, around my lungs. An inky numbness stifled my senses, and my attention hurtled to focus in upon the face painting itself in my thoughts, upon each photo strung up before me. The polaroids were now morphing, re-developing with more clarity than they should've been able to.

A haunting girl's face was then upon each photo.

The girl's face was fully coloured and sharp, vivid in my head and on those mental images, every detail documented and executed with studious attention. But the photos soon flitted away, their presence ephemeral. They faded, the sharp colours losing saturation, the contrasting tones blending, the lines blurring. Angles and curves meshed together until there was nothing but blank white on the faces of each photo, each snapshot. My mind went blank, dark and hazy.

And then there was nothing. Just nothing.

I felt my hand clench tighter in George's, my cold fingers locking in his with a steely force. The intertwining of our hands was less of a comfort and more of a cage. His eyes flitted up to meet mine, and he turned his head just slightly.