To the Boy I Saw in Fever Dreams
I knew he wasn’t real, but that made it easier somehow.
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My pulse races as if I’ve just run a marathon in record time.
Three nurses hold me down while a fourth injects me with what I’ll later know was a tranquilizer. I won’t remember the before of what happened — what led to the moment I was treated as a danger to myself and others.
Afterwards, I lay against the hospital bed, limp, my eyes staring straight towards the closed door.
Minutes or hours pass, I can’t tell. Another nurse peers through the square glass — checking on me, I’m sure, since that’s just part of her job.
I’ve given them trouble this go-around. That’s all I really know.
In a space between awareness and something like sleep, I conjure up a phantom who sits on the side of the bed, fingertips lightly passing over my head.
My eyes flutter open, but there’s no one there.
The vision’s not so much a hallucination as a coping mechanism. Voices in my mind whispered secrets to me — or so I believed — and they were my brand of crazy.
I breathe in and out, trying to steady myself in this room that’s become a type of prison.
It all started with a boy and a cry of loneliness. Grief may have paved my road, but the truth is that I was looking for something — someone — I would never find. That path led me to the idea of a person, a figment of what I thought I wanted and needed, till I almost imagined him into being.
But we don’t live in a magical realm of the universe. Words aren’t spells, and people aren’t mages in some tabletop game. Whatever power I would have in a chaos world doesn’t translate to more than pages filled with ink here.
It’s so disappointing.
But it’s also exhausting to draw out a string of lies just to make a story that might come alive in someone else’s head — and that’s if you do it right.
I don’t need to be haunted by memories. I can haunt myself just fine with the shadow beings I create from the pieces of people I’ve met or seen.
