I’ve Been Having Trouble Sleeping

I’ve been having trouble sleeping, ever since the last full moon. I’m twitchy. I’m too hot. I’m too cold. And when I do sleep, my dreams are just…wrong.

In one I was watching from a distance as an old crone in a blood red Victorian gown, her lips bared against crooked teeth, under her crooked, black eyes, floated over my freshly dug grave. In another I stood on scorched earth with the broken fuselage of a passenger plane scattered around me, and the distinct smell of inefficiently burning jet fuel, burning plastic, and burning skin, abusing my senses.
Just as terrifying, there’s the ones where I’m back in the high school that I graduated from thirty years ago. Somehow, I’m still a student, and I never seem to be wearing pants. Every single night I’m there, and so is a particular face.

I don’t know if the kid with the messy blonde hair and wild look in his eyes was there the first couple of nights. When I did notice him, he was crouched behind the big grey garbage can in the cafeteria, eating a banana, peel and all. He stared at me while he chewed with an open mouth smile. The next few nights I only caught glimpses of him. His head bobbing through a crowd. Flared nostrils fogging up the library windows. Once, I swear he brushed up against me while I stood at a urinal.

It wasn’t until last night that he said something to me. I was in the foyer with a pillow tucked under my arm. A decorative one, not the kind most people sleep on. As faceless students flowed around me like spawning salmon, going to their next class, or maybe going home, a hand emerged. The thumb and forefinger grabbed a corner of the pillow and gave it a couple sharp tugs. I pulled the pillow to my chest, then looked up to the kid standing too close, but not close enough that it stopped the salmon from flowing between us. I told him to bugger off. He smiled wider. He said, don’t you know who I am? And then, the flow dried up. Everyone was in their class, or out the front door, including the kid, and I was alone.

I got the feeling in that moment that I did know who he was, but the details remained out of reach, as if locked behind a door barred with many chains and protective sigils. A door deep under a mountain somewhere, the passage leading to it only visible under a full moon. A door that should most certainly remain hidden.

It’s true, I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, which isn’t great, but I get the feeling that it’s a lot better than opening that door.

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Photo by Andrea Music on Unsplash

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