The kiss in her dream confused her. The feeling in her stomach was right, she thought, but the thin, insubstantial pressure on her lips was like kissing her own hand. Brown eyes, the face somehow too small, artificial, but intricately detailed; she studied it with the purposeful scrutiny of a deliberate dreamer. The features shifted moment to moment; awareness speckled her consciousness. She lay her head on the seat and watched the whirring landscape with resigned interest. The car was going too fast, fleeing something she did not care about. The ocean bellowed in her ears and her chest. He spoke, some indistinct memory of his laugh, a sour, pickled version her brain had saved in a jar, shelved in the dustiest recesses of the Past. He was asking a question, but she did not know if he was speaking to her or out the window, to the racing trees, the setting sun, the Universe. She refrained to ask, not wanting to come between him and whatever he knew to be true.
I want to write more. But it is 1 a.m. and there is nothing left. My parents laugh from the other room. What a comforting sound, a promise of peace. I want to bleed, but I am a husk. If I prick my thumb, air would rush out, deflating me slowly. Even my demise would be quiet and unobtrusive, demure and docile. I keep an image of myself between my teeth like a knife, it's me somewhere I've never been, glitter-spattered and knuckles bloody, laughing at everything and killing my fears one by one by one by one by one by one by one. There are so many. Ha. I want to drive away. If I move, I'll take myself with me, my tiny putrid ecosystem of doubt and decay. But if I lie on a beach in California, won't the new ocean make me clean? Won't I be renewed, appearing suddenly in a new person's life, a different story to tell, a different face to believe in? Getting lost is the same as getting old. Getting old. Old. Old. I am already running out of time. I wish it would stop. Imagine that. What would happen? How would we know it had happened??
I hope you are all okay. I know you will be eventually. It's the only thing I never don't want to believe.