ab.i

Daylight was the thing that she feared the most because it brought waking with it, and a return to the world she longed to leave. She had considered suicide many times over the years, but if she took that way out of what was supposed to be her reality, she would never see him again, never be able to help him, and he was enough to hang on to waking pain for. She didn’t mind that her life didn’t pass its own Bechdel Test, that her reason for hanging on was an him – a dream him even – nor that as her days passed almost mutely in the bakery that most of the voices that spoke around her, that spoke the lines and drove the waking plot around her were male.

He may have been what kept her alive in the day, he may have been the reason for her existence, but she was also the reason for his, and when darkness came and the drift of sleep carried her to him, she actually came alive. Waking was a plodding nightmare, but sleep was a glorious existence of sensation and safety and him.

Daylight had come a few minutes before, however, and it had slipped its millipedenous silia underneath her eyelids and pried them inexorably apart. And he was gone without a goodbye. They never had time for a goodbye, but by now she wouldn’t be able to bear those words from his lips for fear that it would be all too real, and that she would never hear anything from him again. She couldn’t stop it. She awoke. She was back in the “real” world.