Page 19 of True Sight
I smile at my new friend and nod my head, excited about the idea of not spending another Friday night alone in my flat.
“Yeah, I’d like that a lot actually.”
“Sweet, I’ll bring the wine. You drink wine, yeah?”
“Oh, I drink wine.” I nod my head feverishly at her, causing her booming laugh to echo between the old buildings that are surrounding us.
“Alright, well I’ll be over tonight with some wine and you can show me these dance classes you speak so highly of.”
“Because drunk choreographing can’t possibly be a bad idea,” I joke.
“Hey, you never know, maybe it’s a class we can offer inthe future. Some of these Charleston moms would eat that shit up, I can promise you that. Text me your address and I’ll see you at seven.” She flicks her hand at me over her shoulder as she bounces down the sidewalk, the backpack she’d brought with her bouncing against her muscular frame.
I smile to myself before texting her the address to my flat and heading for the studio. Not only did I have a great class this morning and hire a new instructor, but I’d also made a friend in the process. Not to mention, I hadn’t totally scared off my tech guy when my still half asleep brain nonchalantly asked him on a date. As my feet carried me down the pavement, my insides bubbled with excitement at how well everything was going so far.
Today is shaping up to be a great day and it’s only eleven o’clock in the morning.
10
CONRAD
Screeching tires. A woman’s scream. The distinct sound of metal crunching.
And suddenly I feel like I’m drowning and water is filling my lungs. I can feel myself fading, unable to breathe, when suddenly I’m taking in gulps of air and sitting up in my own bed, soaked through my shirt in sweat. My lungs are doing everything in their power to take in as much air as possible as my hands scrub down my face. It’s been a few days since my last nightmare but they’re all the same.
The sound of rubber against asphalt. The vision of a woman’s face—my mother’s face—staring back at me, bleak and lifeless. And the distinct feeling that I’m about to drown if I don’t wake up in time.
As my eyes adjust to my bedroom I notice that I am, in fact, not drowning in anything other than my own sweat. After taking a deep breath, I peel the shirt off of me and toss it to the floor. While my heart rate slows, I stand from my bed and walk to open up the door to Annie’s kennel to let her out, which she happily accepts. We’ve come to an agreement that at night she has to sleep in her kennel. She dancesaround my feet as I walk towards the bathroom to turn on the shower. As I pass the kitchen, I notice that the clock on the oven reads 2:45 and that the sun is still fast asleep just like I know I should be.
But the nightmare had come, just like it had four days ago, and now I’m wide awake.
Friday. The nightmare. Getting Henry’s text at 4:00 a.m. after I’d been up for an hour. He asked me why I was up and I lied to him by saying I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t a full lie, but it wasn’t the full truth either. Ihadn’tbeen able to sleep but the reason for my lack of rest had been kept close to the chest. Not even my friends know about the nightmares and I plan to keep it that way. The only person who knows about them is Hanna and that’s because I’m paying her to fix me.
It has been months of dealing with the same recurring nightmare and years of my friends telling me I need to lighten up. For some reason, the nightmares are happening more frequently now—at least two to three times a week. And the ‘stick’ as my therapist likes to call it had been shoved so far up my ass a long time ago that I don’t even seem to notice it anymore. But everyone else does and I don’t want to be a burden to them or become so insufferable that they don’t want to hang out with me anymore.
I’ve already lost my family; I can’t lose the people I choose to call family too.
Thinking about the nightmare I’ve just woken up from, I remember Hanna’s request that I write them down and track them in a journal of sorts. Being me, I refuse to get a journal to write them in so I opt to just write them down in a note on my phone. I always leave my phone in the bathroom to charge because sleeping with your phone in your bedroom will kill you. Picking it up off the bathroom counter, I half expect to have a text message waiting on mefrom Henry. If his schedule is the same as it was a few days ago, he’ll be teaching a class sometime soon. I can’t believe he’s getting up in the middle of the night to teach classes for people back in London. I think I’m weirdly addicted to work but he’s in a different fucking universe. And why is he always so happy all the time? No one can truly be that happy all the fucking time. Every time I’ve seen him or talked to him there’s this energy radiating out of him that reeks of positivity and joy.
It’s annoying.
When my phone illuminates in the darkness, I find that I have no new messages waiting for me. A sense of disappointment pings in my chest which I think is odd because what do I have to be disappointed about? So what if he hasn’t texted me? Having a text from him outside of business hours would be a severe invasion of my personal time anyways. Not like he seemed to mind that because he texted me several times this weekend with questions about his project. I’d started to collect them in his own special note on my phone so I could answer them all at our weekly meetings, the first of which being today. I curl my lip at the thought of him sitting across from me, his green eyes watching me as I work on his project, asking me more questions than a normal human would.
Deciding that if I’m going to be of any use today, I know that I’ll need to shower fast and try to get back to sleep. I’m meeting him at eleven per his request which means if I shower in less than fifteen minutes, I can get back to bed a little after three and still get a solid four hours of sleep. I strip out of my boxers and step under the hot water. As I start to rinse the cold sweat off my skin, I take a few deep breaths. I always find it hard to relax after a nightmare but over the last few months, I discovered that a nice hot showerand fresh clothes helped take the edge off. I turn under the falling water and let my mind bounce around the thoughts that clog my brain.
How, no matter what I try, the nightmares still come back.
That I’ll have to tell Hanna about tonight’s nightmare when I meet with her on Thursday.
How I hope that when I see Henry later this morning, he doesn’t ask me any stupid questions or tell me that I need to sit up straight.
That his eyes remind me of evergreen trees or a forest of old oaks that always stand strong and steady.
I shake my head at the last one and wipe some water out of my eyes. Where the hell had that come from? Why am I thinking about Henry, in the shower of all places, and the color of his eyes?
“You’re just tired. Hurry up and get out of the shower and go back to bed,” I mumble to myself. Following my own direction, I step out of the shower, wrap a towel around my waist, and head back to bed. Once I have on clean clothes, I crawl into bed and stare at the ceiling. It’s only then that I remember that I didn’t put Annie back into her kennel and she’s sitting on the floor beside me, begging me with her eyes to be allowed to come up.
“Well, come on then,” I offer with a wave of my hand. She takes a big leap and settles herself into the crook of my side, curling up into a ball and falling asleep almost instantly.
