"I know, I've heard her screaming... Everyone has." She replied in a voice that was all too familiar.
I was already late for school and had missed my ride there. Again. So I had to make do with the pestering overly concerned parenting style approach my mom had planned for both my brother and I.
Her questions about my dreams were never ending and ruthless and her tone of voice was sugar coated in pity, but she bore none of the real emotion that came with it.It made me furious being stuck in this too small car, with questions that were just too big.
I was suffocating in fresh air, and so it was no surprise that when I got to school I was ready to rip someones jugular out and my first victim was heading right into the storm. My best friend Dean. She walked toward me in her causally brilliant way that made all the girls jealous and all the boys slaves.Everything just seemed to come so naturally to her. It seemed as if the universe lived to help her succeed, but 15 years of experience had taught me to know better.
"It looks like you're ready to loose your shit." she said with sudden caution, as she slowed her approach to a safe distance away and waited for my reply.
"I'm ready to do more than just that." I replied without hesitation, cutting her reply off as I started for my first class of the day. AP Chemistry.
There is just something about being told that the world is merely a chance happening and that everything we know and love and idolize is a combination of tiny microscopic atoms randomly bumping into each other, that can calm you down... close enough to death by boredom really.
The bell signaled freedom, if only for two minutes, and with Dean by my side I took this opportunity to rant about my mom and how everything she said managed to drive me completely crazy.
Later at lunch in our schools overcrowded cafeteria, I told her that my dreams had started again.
"Are they still the same ones as last time?" she softly whispered
"Have they ever been different?" my sarcasm dripping off the words like acid over silk.
Every night it was the same thing. The same dream. It would start off with me, alone in a field. There was a storm coming and the lightning behind the dark grey clouds was ominous.
I'm petrified and I start running. I don't know where I'm going and I don't know why I'm running, but I run like my life depends on it.Then I'm waking up to my own terrified screams as my eyes grow accustomed to the pale moonlit darkness of my room. The sound of footsteps rushing down the wooden corridor. A warm hand and a soothing voice softly promising I'm alright and safe and that everything was just a twisted fragment of my own tortured subconscious.
And this would happen, on a good night, two or three times. On a bad night. More than I care to remember.
The pictures and emotions that flashed through my mind were always so vivid. So real. Everything I felt was so pure that when I woke up, reality felt more like the hazy illusion of life than my dreams had been.
Sleeping for less than 3 hours every night might have been the reason I was always so impossible and why I found living so hard to do. These dreams also created the innate fear of the dark inside me, because when the dark only promised horrors, how could you love it?
I wished everyday that I would just fade into everything surrounding me. I felt like I was being suffocated by the walls in my classes, the doors of my moms car, the clothes clinging to my body in the hot summers air.
I felt trapped. I felt like I was stuck in an eternity of being a tiny little ant in a glass container, following long tunnels that lead to no where.
Every road, tunnel, bridge, stairway and journey always had a start and an end. A reason it was put there. To span a gap or allow for transport. So what was I doing here. I felt like everyday of my life was being compressed into one long tunnel of memories that were full of darkness and blurs, that I was trying to crawl through, and somehow I just knew it didn't end anywhere significant not anywhere worth writing about.
A bridge had more purpose than my life, but here I was, a little ant, crawling through a never ending narrow tunnel. One that just seemed to overpower me. A tunnel that was dark and cold.
"Sammy. Snap out of it!" It was Deans shrill and obviously irritated voice, that had pulled me out of my day dreams.
"Sorry, I guess I'm just distracted."
"Wow, either those dreams are really bad or that guy across the cafeteria has really caught your attention. Go say hi!" I was being dragged across the twelve meter room before I even knew what was happening, and suddenly, he was there.
"Hi Dean. Sammy." His words were just as effortless as he was.
Oh God. I felt my blood rushing up to my cheeks, and the sweat starting to form in the palms of my hands. I could hear my heart beating against the veins in my neck. The blood struggling to get free of it's restraints. It was the only thing keeping me from falling over, until his piercing voice broke my focus and reminded me that I hadn't replied to whatever I was being asked.
"Yes. I do." I blurted it out, without even thinking and regretted it the second it happened. I could see that, that might not have been the most appropriate response for whatever he'd said, by looking at Deans face of disbelief and the tiny hint of poison that crept into her response directed towards me. I really couldn't pay attention to whatever it was because I was mesmerized by the tiny twinkle of curiosity that lived in Denmarkos' eyes.
It was a hint of magic in a forest of dark green. A forest I was now hopelessly lost in. My fantasies were soon interrupted by the bell. Home time. Oh the joys.
Dean invited me over for the afternoon, which meant an invitation to the most beautiful house where, just like her, everything was opulent and over the top. Waist high, white marble counters sparkling in the glimmer of the crystal chandelier, greeted me with winks of light and glimpses of the most delicious looking pastries mankind could ever hope for.
Her whole family seemed to be decedents from Aphrodite and Zeus and I bet people would always wonder about how we had become such good friends although we were so different. Her being the envy of every teenage girl, skinny, outspoken and drop dead gorgeous, ad me being the weird, dark punk girl with poor taste in hair products... well people don't always understand that Dean and I share more than just fashion secrets.
and the fact that Dean still chose to remain single was a myth all on its own. I had heard the speil enough times to be able to recite it by heart.
"I am a powerful women, and I don't need the opinions of some little boy defining me. I define myself and thats blah blah blah." I usually stopped listening somewhere around there.
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