Emotions

"Where am I?" I pondered, looking around.

The darkness of my dream had enveloped me whole.

I knew this was a dream because I recalled laying down on the floor to rest a while ago but for whatever reason, I could feel this suffocating grip pulling me deeper into a realm of despair and torment as if this was reality.

'Where am I going?' I asked myself as I began wandering around the darkness.

I tried imagining buildings and people appearing out of thin air but I was unable to change anything in my surroundings.

"Isn't this a dream? Shouldn't I be a god in this world?" I asked, disappointed by my lack of control.

With each step I took deeper through the unknown void, an unexplainable burden was weighing heavily upon my heart, threatening to crush me under its weight.

'Why do I feel like I'm walking with a thousand pounds attached to me?'

As I gazed downward, I witnessed my body sinking into the ominous embrace of this inky and viscous liquid that was eager to swallow me whole.

'What's this?'

It was as if the darkness itself was hungering for my surrender.

If this was the real world, I would've been struggling and racking my brain to escape this predicament I was in but understanding that it wasn't, I made the conscious decision to relinquish control and allow the darkness to consume.

It was futile to struggle against the inevitable regardless.

The deeper I sank, the more this sense of eerie calmness settled over me, numbing my every sense and enveloping me in its cold embrace.

By the time my entire body had sunk into the liquid, it was like I was trapped in a prison where I couldn't move a single inch of any of my limbs.

It was like being encased inside a giant pool of jelly.

'Ha... is this meant to be a nightmare?' I asked myself as the bodies of people began materializing around me.

Their expressions were twisted with what I could only assume to be resentment; that'd make the most sense.

There was my Father, a bottle of vodka in his hand. His bloodshot eyes were filled with venomous anger and with a drunken slur to his voice, he began unleashing a flood of accusations that sliced through the air coldly.

"Worthless piece of shit," he spat, the stench of alcohol permeating from his mouth even though he wasn't real.

"I should've never had you. Your mother was a whore that I only planned on keeping for a while. You were never meant to be in this world. You were never meant to be alive."

He took a swig of his vodka and gazed back at me. "Everything wrong in my life is because of you. You ruined me." And then he literally spat on me.

'How's he able to move so freely in this liquid but not me?' I wondered. 'That's not fair,' I pouted.

Beside him stood my mother, her gaze cold and distant. "I should've aborted you," were the first words she hissed at me.

'But without me, how would you be able to afford all the drugs needed to sustain your lifestyle?' I chuckled.

"If you were never born... if you didn't chain my life to that terrible man, I could've left. I could've pursued the life I always wanted. I was meant to be a model walking down runways and you stole that from me. I sacrificed everything for you and you repay me by taking my life?'

'A model? Your face is barely a three out of ten.'

From the shadow, more and more people from my life back on Earth emerged.

There were the delinquents from rival schools, their sneers etched upon their faces. "You thought you thought you were better than us, didn't you?" one of them taunted with a voice dripping with disdain.

Another one chimed in, "Just because you had good grades and had a clean image at your school."

A third said, "All those A's in your report card, where did that bring you? Nowhere."

"You're a failure, just like the rest of us."

"You're not better than us."

'At least I'm not dressed in a spiked jacket and rocking a mohawk. What is this? The 1980s?'

People from all different eras of my life, some of whom I'd even forgotten, began speaking all at once, overlapping each other.

Their bitter words reverberated through the nightmarish landscape but none of them could ever pierce my heart.

Any accusation they had on my character, none of them struck deep. There were no old wounds for them to reopen. There were no fires of self-doubt that burned within me for them to fuel.

There was no weight of their blame pressing upon my shoulders. The only weight was the weight of the liquid I was encased.

'When can I get out of this dream?' I pondered.

I was blocking out the noises coming my way because it was distracting but when it did become silent — my attention was pulled back in.

I looked around and the sea of tormentors had vanished and alone stood a figure.

It was dark in the liquid so I couldn't see them as they stood from afar.

'Can you please get closer? Whose turn is it?'

The figure was shrouded in this cloud of mystery yet, for some reason, they were radiating a strange sense of familiarity.

There was no choice but for that to be the case because why else would they get the spotlight all to themself?

'This must be the final boss of this nightmare.'

That unknown figure slowly approached, revealing itself to be a female although her features were still obscured by shadows.

'Could you walk any slower?'

As she emerged from the depths of my nightmare, the surrounding darkness and the inky liquid vanished, leaving just the two of us in this infinite space of white.

I didn't even have the time to think about the change or look around to see what else was in my dream.

I just looked at the woman in front of me in complete silence both in mind and mouth.

I didn't speak, not because I didn't want to or couldn't open my mouth; it was because I was scared to do so.

When was the last time I saw her?

Not just physically but even in pictures or videos. I had deleted all of them.

Seeing her reminded me of a part of myself that I had lost a long time ago.

She also stared at me. Even though I knew she wasn't real. Even though I knew she was a figment of my imagination that had come to haunt me in my nightmare, I wanted to touch her.

We stared at each other and slowly, I saw as tears formed in her eyes.

I couldn't soothe whatever pain she was feeling. I had no words to comfort her with.

As that first drop of tear trickled down her cheek, she opened her mouth with a question, "How could you?"

Another tear dropped on the other side of the face.

"How could you abandon me?" she asked, her voice ready to shatter into pieces.

She grabbed her face and with her nails, she began dragging it down, tearing up her skin. Her tears began mixing with her blood.

It wasn't real but I grabbed her hands and pulled them away.

"You left me... when I needed you the most," she muttered, her voice laced with anguish. "You turned a blind eye to my pain... to the tears I shed in your absence. How could you?"

No accusations earlier had impacted me a single bit but the weight of her words bore down upon me, threatening to push down into a state of emotions I had long abandoned.

"I never intended to hurt you," I whispered.

"Lies," she refuted.

"I mean it."

She repeated again, "Lies," as she grabbed my neck with her hands and began squeezing. "Lie lie lie... that's all you ever do. That's all you are. A liar that abandoned me when I was... when I was—"

It wasn't even her real self but she was unable to finish her words as if it would hurt too much to say.

She tightened her grip around my throat as she laid her head peacefully on my chest. The darkness had reappeared, closing in around us, swallowing the white space.

I couldn't find the strength nor did I feel like I deserved to push back further against her sharp words.

"I needed you. You were the one person I thought I could trust. I left my parents, I abandoned my old friends... I did all that for you," she said, tightening her grip so much that her nails dug into my flesh.

I could physically feel the pain and despite it being a dream, I didn't wake up.

"You should've never come into my life if all you were going to leave me with was pain and suffering," she cried.

She lifted her head from my chest and with a final powerful squeeze, she said with a face full of tears, "I hate you... Asher. From the bottom... from the deepest pit of my heart, I hate you."

The intensity of the moment was both physically and emotionally suffocating. My breath was stolen away completely as she strangled me with all the strength she was able to muster.

I looked at her as her body began becoming one with the enveloping darkness.

With no air in me, I let out a weak, "Sorry."

As I jolted awake, my body was drenched in a sheen of cold sweat. With trembling hands, I wiped my forehead dry, each motion deliberate as I hid the evidence of the nightmare I was just in.

As I yawned, I stretched my sore arms.

"Finally awake," said Quentin Atwood, my brother's friend and the teacher he had recommended. "How was your sleep?"

With a smile, I shrugged.

"What?" he said in disbelief. "You're telling me that you don't feel any different?"

"Not really," I truthfully answered.

"What did you see?" he questioned, scratching his head in confusion.

"I just saw a few people from my past," I answered.

"And how was it?"

I thought about it for a second. At the moment, when I was standing directly in front of her, some of my abandoned old self had returned but now that I was back in the real world without her image here, all of that had disappeared once again.

"It was a fun experience," I said with genuine honesty.

"Fun? You're a weird one Bell," said Quentin. "You were meant to experience the worst nightmare possible. The purpose was to raise your emotions to an extreme so that nothing else can impact you in comparison. Did you not enter the nightmare?"

I just smiled and told him, "Don't worry. It did its job."

His concern was never one to worry about in the first place.

I stared off into the distance and a thought appeared in the back of my mind which I quickly suppressed.

It said, 'What emotions?'