Drowning, only without water. Only without me. Sometimes without words or worlds. After a while, you get used to it. You realize you can drown almost without anything. Drowning, only me.

You don't need water to drown, only memory. Soon, you come to know you don't even need water to breathe.

It's disconcerting, to say the least. It wouldn't be far-fetched to say, I've had dreams before.
I've had nightmares before. But I have never had dreams of nightmares before. How can I get the nightmares to stop following me if I remained ever hopeful? Unbidden, without any cause or reason, I remain filled with hope.

Frayed and olden, the ship was sinking. That's the only thing I understood. Did it matter?
No, not really. Only that this was a dream. Was it worth squeezing out of that worn-out oculus? Hardly. I was dreaming. That was definite. Watery as it was, I could feel it. I was aware of that. I was aware, but not woken yet. I wasn't a moken in this chapter. I thought I could handle it. But this was only a dream. It's only a life, only one life. I was the bullet on the ground. Wasted but not used. Through it all though, I could feel the weight of this dream, pressing down, willingly I went into that cold, cold void.

It was unavoidable to wake up from it now. And quite frankly, why would I want to do that anyway?

I turned without turning to watch the ship sink silently beside me. I wasn't stoic. I wasn't mute. I was only human. The oaken ship was right next to me, compared to me, unlike me it wasn't here.

Even in this dream, I was watery enough to coax myself out of my own skin and follow this song all the way home.

I wasn't dead, but I didn't care. The truth was I wasn't home. The fantasy was I wasn't going home.

I felt so strange, I was a stranger in my own dream; my sense of loss amazed me even now in that moment, at that moment. I was sketching all kinds of wrong things right in front of me, as much as I was being sketched in that stray moment.

As I floated beside the ship, I saw I was not drowning—merely floating on the water’s surface. My face was wet, I could feel that, but it wasn't rainwater or spume. It felt like blood when in actuality it wasn't. Even though it was the other liquid, still, because of that I could finally accept all the designs in the finality of this loss and that the sea was final.

Then the waves of a darker ocean jerked me forward, carrying me forth from the depths of the green-blue ocean, propelling me upward to the sky in a moment made drunken from the fall of men. And from my own fall as well. I might as well add that, and I will.

That was all well and good. This was my fall in the fall. I was finally falling. My hair remained yellow in this retelling, even though the yolkish sun was not.

Then I was falling freely in a free fall that wasn't free at all. I dropped from the sky, plummeting down to the bottom of this wet moment. I couldn't get my hair, dirty and blonde, out of my eyes. But it was the intangible part of me that remained unwashed in this verse. I plunged suddenly and deeply. Everything hurt, then my body pitched over the edge that wasn't there, tumbling toward the ground that was.

My mind was screaming. I guess I was too. We all do, my kind, in our own way. We may flail a lot, but we're not frail not even a little bit. But who's there to hear us and wake us up from this. Who responds to us, comes to our succor other than winter. And it's only fall. What's September when you are the one wearing this riding hood red in color inside this eatery that's not a bakery. I am looking up at the rafters, where are all the ravens at, I am at the wrong rookery.

Sinking. Sink. Sinking. Sipping. Sip. I was half fish, but I wasn't swimming away. Alas, there were no oceans between us, oh Amy Lee. Oh, how were you to know that?

The water is fickle, but do we accept that? Learn from it? We are muddy molasses, too stubborn to be the darkened smudges around the stars.

Little else was there for me to do than to glance down. So I looked down at the ground rushing up eagerly to meet me. I welcomed its concrete embrace with open arms.

Out of nowhere, an enormous building manifested itself in the gray. It shot right up in a second that took some god forgotten somewhere to regret all of his decisions, as I continued to plunge down the skeletal building, dropping, descending by it.

The speed, that moment of loss was too gigantic to be dismissive, yet it was. I looked at it as I went down and down I went. The building resembled a skyscraper that somehow reached up beyond the pinking clouds. It looked a little like the Chrysler building. What did it matter? Did it mean I was here when I was actually here? I don't know. I was far away, homeless in that stillest of moments, where all the horses are golden. Where are those golden horses now?

If we were playing Russian roulette or the seasonal game of clichés, which I had mastered, I'd say I was leaving all my troubles behind. Escaping even the sunlight of yore. In that moment, the wind felt good, so good. At that moment, I could pray for an end. Again and again.

Suddenly
Something

There was a flicker. A whisper. A flutter of wings. No cawing in the dell. Where were the ravens? There weren't any unkindness around anymore, no murder. Was there a murderer? In all of this, I wouldn't know. A trill. A whistle for all the woodland creatures to gather around me. But there weren't any forests left around here. It was in a sense a moment of lucidity in otherwise a dreamlike state. Objectless, a tasteless frieze. But it was a false awakening. A perfect storm of helplessness. All the dinosaurs were good here.

Suddenly there was Aeron, visible in his Phantom of the Opera mask he wore on my seventeenth birthday. But then he was gone just like when he was last seen on the roof of his apartment. Aeron who all the dried palettes had claimed him to be their own. He in return claimed to be a painter, but it was me who had abandoned him like an imperfect painting.

I knew this was a dream. I knew then I was sleeping. It was a dream within a dream within a kiss, that Morpheus was dreaming and Poe was alive. But Morpheus was dead wrong about a dream; mine. It was never my dream.

I had passed the building and quite possibly was at the bottom by now. When I glanced up all I could see were the wet silhouettes with their guns drawn on that skyscraper’s roof—looking down at me. In the originality of the clouds, I saw visages broken with malevolence peering down at me. Charter your way to me now, boys. All the charts and the maps are ruined. How do you like me now, Mr. Joker?

I was still hurtling through space in between the years, going down headfirst. That narrow place between mayhem and harmony. So it is possible that a somersault and a cartwheel in mid-air was involved in this revamped stop-loss, that's about to be turned into a winter song.

I froze right there aerially only for a second though and then I continued to drop. For a little while there, I was aerial in a moment that was already airy.

I turned to look down. I was still sinking, slowly going down down down. Soon things would be inverted. My face would be unrecognizable from the sidewalk that I was about to meet. I was thinking about detours of life, twists of fate by the time I was fully in a sunken place. Try peeling me away from this story now.

It's funny. I don't have a language any more. My accent is mostly gone, but not completely. I am a girl without a country. In dreams and its bleak reality, I am a woman colorless. I don't have my own weight here to pin down anything, fleeting or otherwise. What I have spun is from the web of my spindly thoughts.

Shades of my dreams are colorless and I remain guileless. Whatever I am in this odd little reimagining, I belong to the moors. For once, they are mine.

In the center of the city of stone, I am set adrift. I am left to throb within the crumbling tabby facades, flaky ideas like I am the city's dead heartbeat. A Stone City unnecessarily walled in by the brittle moon. Much like the walled city I left behind and the one I didn't take with me.

In the crook of my arms, pale untold universes were telling a story of their own. In the hollows of my arms, resided a mellow sun. In the cockle of my lively heart, I am ashamed, wandering, wondering, helpless against its own nature like a gullible wolf and a guilty sheep.

I need to be free right now, more than I have the need to open my eyes into this world and reject my own. I need to truly let go, be gone. In order to hold on, I must really let go and disappear into my own mind.

Sometimes that's enough, even though not worth the sacrifice the time makes. But other times, the history of the rain and a memory of a fish are enough.

The city I am dwelling in, for now, is about to be painted for war. Why? Well, it's simple. This place, a city of a million heartbeats and a billion dreams. Well, those dreams are not dead yet, are you. Unburied, one by one they all must go sour. It's a fun task, someone ought to do it, why not me?

In this violent shade, I offer myself. Why? Look at my face, look at it, the paint is already there glistening.

Then I looked around. At once I felt defeated. I needed too much of myself to rebuild here. And I just can't. I felt so lost in my own story. What's even more haunting, I am nothing like my story. My biggest woe in this renewed lie is I don't know what is fiction and what is fictitious. Even if this kiss of fiction is mine, still, I cannot separate myself from it.

I am left grappling with the burning question that keeps burning like a little red lung; who am I in all this. What am I, which part of me is the myth, and which part is the moth?

In this vast emptiness, on this speck of nothing, am I nothing but a sillage of nothingness? Am I a dream, or am I dreaming? Am I death or am I time?

I know, I am the consciousness preceding matter. What I really wanted to know is am I more than just a walking ossuary filled with sad, sad bones. I know I am full of suspense and comedy. Nothing is rubbing up against me, not even imagination, my untouched skin remained unrepentant and inanimate. My sense of humor is what is making the Fates laugh aloud, those nasty old crones, I am hilarious, my humor is killing me. But no one human is laughing. Only me.

Up till now, all the other worlds that had been swirling in my mouth started to rot away. But as misplaced as I am here, at least I am using my mouth right. The way it ought to be used. By denying the alternate possibilities, that's how.

I am not waiting for change, I am not. So. In the middle of the middle of my nowhere, I know I must start anew. I am not waiting, but I have to begin de novo. I do. That's the way, it has to be. That's my exit. Mostly because I exist. It is no longer a sin to deny myself.

Abruptly, the reddened sky spat me out, releasing me, and I fell again. My blue trench coat aflutter flapping in the wind. As I dropped into a warmth that stopped a heart. But who impelled who is the one who pulled the trigger.

I woke up with a jolt that was painful. My eyes snapped open, my breath shallow. I woke up with all too familiar disorientation and as usual, with a dry mouth — my Persian was on my back.

Staying on, he started to rub against my neck and purred. But surely something else was astir, bestirring me.

I had awakened other things while waking up myself. I woke up in a half-empty, one-bedroom apartment to a haphazard mess that was my life. In the shadows, among the skulls and bones were my knick-knacks scattered throughout the room. Books and clothes were strewn across the dull hardwood floor mingling with the dust from my body, along with the dirt of something else, in layers quite unimaginable.

I woke up to this view in the catacombs as I tried living inside my shell. And, what a nightmare it was, waking up.

I was up but not getting up, looking around, taking in my life, such as it had become. I exhaled the demons and laid back down on the pillows. Settling back in, I knew I wasn't alone, but I wouldn't settle for that. We weren't alone, I couldn't escape that. Breathe in and out. Cold ink in my veins making me feel a part of myself again.

Vestiges of yesterday lingered on like lingering thoughts, all those erstwhile aspirations still fallow, still there, the hope still freshening. Unlike my breath, which was anything but fresh.

To be fair, I didn't create this mess. If I told the truth right now, did that make it acceptable? This mess had created me, a mess created a mess of botched paints for once, and I thanked it for the delicious disarray.

I was the Frankenstein's Monster in this unfair song sans the Doctor himself. So little choice I had other than to reemerge as a voyager and come here. So I did.

We all hope to leave our endless stories behind from whence we come from. We hope to find ourselves in new places yearning to be in stories that would make us feel a little less lonely with ourselves.

Here the cats come in. But the cats don't remind us we need other humans, we do. Cats would never hurt us like that. They are just enough. Though I did my cat a huge disservice by naming him Atlantis in a moment of sheer stupidity, with complete lack of self-awareness, without even an ounce of irony, the dramatic kind.

Don't laugh, I regret it as it is. As I do too this too meta moment. And yet, I named him Atlantis but I am who wanted to vanish. If this was happening now instead of now, I'd go with Odin. You can laugh now. I know I am laughing, and laughing, not knowing it's not funny anymore. If it ever were.

We move forward, never backward despite going back sometimes. But still, traces of the past hangs in the air like stale poetry. And here I am immobile, lying on the bed not made out of thistles. Lying still, not moving skewered between the steampunk dreams I want to have and my nonlinear reality.

How to hold all of that inside myself? How to keep all this contained in my heart. All of this would stop my heart in a heartbeat. And yet, this day is heartening even though it'll have a sad ending, that wouldn't involve death by the end of it. It began that way, with Death of Reason, because there is no reason. It's all about the endings, isn't it? But I can't gamble on that. On my cat, sure, but not on this. Well, it's a good thing my heart is already hocked then. It's much unneeded, a bit overwrought, just a little. I don't know why it bothered to beat at this point or at all, this mechanical heart of mine, a false heart playing me false. Why? Well, why indeed. I am breaking my own heart trying to hold in so much of myself? Why do we do that, really. No, really. Tell me. I wanna know, show me, really. Really, really.

As I lay there, not dying but not alive either. On which bed though. What? As I exist solely on this plane, my thoughts started to turn into sodden whorls. Something was glowing on my skin chafing me, making me feel I already knew what I knew. All manner of things were becoming very clear to me. This blemish I could endorse, it was very endearing. Because I understood it. I could handle the dawn. Bring it on.

I could see my breath frosting over in front of me. My face glossed over with sleep, streaked with whey texture not quite there. I hadn't even opened my mouth to yawn or anything, but I could feel all the cicadas trying to crawl their way out. I'd want them to come out into this life all right. I still held such notions dear to my dreary heart.

Of course, they won't make it out of this alive, none of us will, or even in one piece. But why would I despair? The birth of something that's bound to die is just so beautiful.

The maze of my thoughts had swallowed me whole. I was nowhere and everywhere. Something was nuzzling my neck, startling me slightly and I do not use the word slightly.
I twisted around panicking, but it was only Atlantis nudging me with his head. He wanted his breakfast. He was doing all but pointing to his mouth.

Meh. I'll get up when I get up. Then I thought I heard something. I was about to dismiss it as white noise but, no. A rustling sound was coming from somewhere.

It was more than the hungry ocean raging inside my head. Atlantis had perked up too, he was looking around looking rather uncomfortable, making me feel more anxious.

See, I wasn't imagining things again. Atlantis wouldn't talk but he damn sure could see. His head was making these jerky circular movements like he was mimicking a shadow he was trying hard to catch.

Something else was in here besides the two of us. I was sure of it. As sure I was that this was real. We weren't alone, we never are.

A hoary presence was looking at me. I felt that. Something other than my cat was staring at me.

I tried turning on my side, and maybe I did. All I know is-

Unwittingly, I couldn't move. I tried but couldn't. It felt like something heavy was holding me down.

Maybe I was still sleeping. Maybe I had fallen asleep again and I didn't realize that. Maybe I was the forest, or in one. Maybe it was just the weight of my regrets, warm and nebulous, the direct result of decisions of others that I couldn't avoid. Some escapist I am.

Whatever the case, I was being made to listen to something not so dissimilar to me. Indiscernible, sure but it sure did disarm me.

Then the unknown was whispering to me. It wasn't an earworm this time around, keep it in mind. Sibilant suggestions humming in my ear. Burning me further, even though my mind was already aflame.

Some of the suggestions I even liked, felt an urge to carry them out. Aghast, I glanced at Atlantis nervously, expecting him to be horrified. But his expression was impassive. He didn't look that impressed. He wasn't interested in the mundane anymore, the intrusive presence didn't interest him any longer.

Whatever that was there in the room with us, my cat wouldn't let it make a move against me. That much was clear.

This is why we must place our full faith in cats completely and not in people. People are disappointing. It's in the presence of others we feel less. We came from each other, but we were never made to live together. We gather and we move on. When that doesn't happen, we become aggressive. Our kind is dreck and dross, wholly lacking.
Unlike the one-time gods that I love so much.

Cats would never put us down, go against us. Make fun of us. Take us in jest. Trivialize themselves like we do with bullshit.
They would never brutalize us. They wouldn't turn on us on a whim, betray us. They wouldn't love us, but cats would never judge us.

I'd trust a cat over a human any given time, every single time. Cats are my friends, like all my demons. Just, my demons tap into me. They use me to fuel their pleasures. The facepaint they are using copiously is from the jars I had set aside for myself, but that's fine in this take.

Things are strange, it's always the outlines of the abstract that wanted to be a permanent part of me. Come inside and implode within me. Always looking for a way in. To get inside. What must I do?

Forfeit? Maybe it's so much easier to just give in. Give up. After all, we have already given up. There is something so satisfying about heroes' surrender. When your heroes fail, they do more than just let you down, they let you go too. It's a good thing then that the defeat of saints is the only thing my palate can handle these days. Be a good little liar, and say it's true.

There is something utterly gratifying about marring any beauty we come across. Maybe because we all resent it. We were never meant to keep the beautiful things around us. That's why we tarnish what we can destroy what we could in our wake.

That's why men abuse women. That's why women let them. They’d rather sully everything as if it was their choice when it never was.

We don't deserve beautiful things. We don't deserve our mothers. This is not our home. All the wolves are gone. Like my accent and I am truly identityless now.

Why should we fall for heroes, when it's the ritual of their failure that made us believe in them in the first place.

It's not like we don't know any better. We know their end. We've seen it. Seen to that they reach the bloodied end that was written on the skin of their lies.

But we are helpless against nature and against our own. We are all looking for magic that is not there.

I don't get it, get out, but don't mind my confusion. It's difficult but not hard. It's so simple. We all know what we must do. Why does everyone make it so complicated, when we should just embrace the shame. We ought to be doing that right now. Embrace the shame, embrace it.

The fact is, too few villains and too many heroes is the reason for the shape we are in. Be a good girl now, brutalize and then beautify yourself, you little beast.

Then I quickly interjected myself, hoping to explain why Alice was full of malice in this. I wanted to deemphasize that the White Rabbit was really innocent of her.

What to do. Sigh. Despite hanging in the balance, I felt like a ghostwriter writing something that's not mine. Weaving something I am not familiar with. I never built this. Half that is still me and the other half that is something else, aswirl

Look. no one asks to be born into an opinion, we inherit that, I get that. Even if we are stuck in that, how do we squeeze out of it. Because we sure are squeezed out of time.

The thing is, no matter how much I rewrite this, rearrange everything all over, over and over again, it seems like I am the one who is haunting the ghost here.

But then again, I am the ghost who can ghost this story. Yellow and fading. At the bottom of this brittle paper, residual human touches can still be felt. All we are left with are the caresses of ghosts. That is if we are lucky or stupid. I don't know which. What I do know is.

I know how it is done and this is not it.

But sooner or later, one way or another, somehow, a fable will be told.

Not equal to this dying night, I could move again, yah! But we didn't have genuine freedom, not yet anyway. We wouldn't really be free until and unless we stopped being slaves to what our fathers had mixed into this earth.

If I admit that the human fallacy, quite formal, makes the creed cold, will you accept that it is human error that makes it warm?

Since I was able to, I turned around and laid on my back again. Yep, you're looking at the master of the supine. I burrowed into my pillows and exhaled already exhausted. I might have sighed again.

Now before I open my eyes into this world and blacken my surroundings again. Now, now, before I get up to feed my cat. And you know my head, cause if you wanna feed your mind, you gotta feed your mouth first.

Before I do all that, I'll just say this. I have learned the hard way since my time spent roaming around in the heartland of the Franks, but I learned it anyway and now I know. There are no monsters here, only men.

But I wouldn't let it bother me. It's not embarrassing, it's just I know better now.

Okay, now I really have to get up and wring some of the spilled blood from history and out of my own history. Teehee. So in order to get going, in the quietest part of my mind, I fully accept this day. I am fatal that way. Now I am more than equal to this dying light.

This new relationship with a familial sun notwithstanding, the moon hasn't broken me in quite yet, don't you worry, and not that bruised by the starlight, I can stand up and walk into the lives around my life. My entire face twisted into an ugly smile at this prelapsarian joy, that's bound to happen. Everything felt so imminent.

If the dead comedians could survive in this city, so could I. There are always different narratives at play of course, but I felt this was the real story behind these words.

All I can give you is no matter what, we continue, we go on. That's neither a good thing or bad, nor is it permanent. And we don't need to know any more than that. We go on, we keep moving forward, we make do. Until we are no more. Then we become what we were before we were rudely pulled out of an empty void and yanked into existence- at peace.

That's how we carve a legacy that's all our own. This is how a Cheshire grin is fashioned out of these sad, sad bones. You gotta give something to the dragons to gnaw on. 'cause I am done with chewing up the silence.

Okay look, nobody earns an ending. But sometimes, sometimes the endings we get are a little happier.

But even so, no I am not done yet, I really should have struggled more to stop it from happening. But a part of me wanted to be here.

We are not without loss here. I know that. Although, we didn't lose anything we didn't have. What we lost, the time gained, the death is in the trees. We're all at a loss here. But ultimately that's the hysteria of living and eventually, we're going to have to deal with the sickness of being alive.

We don't exist, we are stranded on a rock. Then we are not. That may be, but we are the true victors here. What we possess is not valued in money.

Shameful confession time. It is in the wee hours of the morning all the possibilities seem possible, but keep in mind and keep me too, that it's the possibilities that kill us.

It was with that possibility in mind, I finally got up. I got some canned cat food for At to eat up. In the mediocrity of that moment, what I was looking for at the end, found me in the end.

Finally, an ending figured me out.

Somewhere, an alarm was going off and something jumped on the bed.