They watch you.

Through eyes too large and too dark.

They don’t hide in shadowed corners like beasts of legend and myth. Instead, they watch you from underneath bright lights.

Your hand is steady when it reaches out, when fingers close around shifting texture wrapped in soft plastic. You pull back a bag of sugar. It sags over your hand. The grain is brown but you can’t read the brand, words blur in front of your eyes.

Their eyes burn. They wait in silence. And though they don’t say a word, you know why they wait, with no clear understanding as to why you know. Eager to catch the one moment you slip.

You put the bag in your cart and push it down the aisle. The wheel squeals, piercing in a way no sound in reality ever is, it echoes across never ending space filled with rows and rows of overfilled shelves.

More eyes turn; more watch.

Your skin prickles and burns, blood rushes through your body, sweat beads at your temple, your heart beats louder than even the wheel, pounding in your ears. Your chest tightens. They have seen you, they have judged you, they have found you lacking.

Their voices crescendo, overlapping and crashing like ocean waves. They speak of you in whispers louder than the tolling of a bell. You are not one of us, they say. You are not right, they scream. You do not belong, they wail.

You run. They follow.

This is a nightmare. It must be.

—

Pen scratches on paper. You are here.

Though you can’t say how.

Minutes and hours, days and years shift suddenly with no rhyme or reason. You are once a child on your mother’s lap, her weathered hands combing through your hair. You are now here. Taller than her and not half as prepared. Time has moved in the blink of an eye you don’t remember closing.

Like in all dreams, memories come and go, speeding clips of a life you only vaguely remember living, giving you only the barest of hints as to how you are here.

Pen scratching on paper.

No one speaks. No one watches. Suddenly you are so very alone. Your chest hollows, twisting into itself, collapsing into a blackhole that swallows all your fear, all your joy, all your misery until nothing is left but an empty shell puppeted through mere muscle memory.

Your pen scratches on paper. You take down notes. Your fingers click on the keys of a keyboard. You take down more notes.

You remember, like you might the distant memory of colour long after you’ve lost your sight, your once lofty dreams. You dream, just as distantly, of breaking free. Of tearing through skin that has fused with the seat of your chair, of tearing apart chains that keep you bound here, of chasing those dreams to wherever they might take you.

But this is a nightmare. It has to be. So, you remain, with all the certainty of one who has accepted fate and stopped to let their mind’s phantoms devour them whole.

—

There’s a restlessness to you and your thoughts. A flittering reminiscent to a hummingbird hopping to its next meal, but with far less grace.

There’s a knot in your throat and an itch to your skin that tells you have forgotten something.

That a task of dire importance has been forgotten and you’re quickly running out of time to accomplish it. A suffocating anxiety of an ever looming, never approaching threat. Always on the brink of destruction but never quite there.

It hounds you as you eat your dinner, and laugh with family. As you brush your teeth, and argue with friends. Like many things in the realm of dreams and nightmares, the feeling has no reasoning or logic. It simply is. Present to haunt you and nothing else.

Because this is a nightmare.

You’re scared.

This is not a sudden realisation.

You have always been scared. Because this is a nightmare conjured by your own self.

You’re scared of many things.

Of the eyes and their whispers. Of your mask slipping in front of all, letting all that is wrong, and worse yet all that is different, spill out.

Of change. Of potential. Of bright dreams and new hopes. Of the risk of ruin that comes with it.

You’re scared of the blackhole that eats all with overwhelming greed and leaves nothing but scraps.

—

You’re scared of the nothing inside you.

You’re scared you’re doing it wrong. Though you couldn’t say what “It” was – everything perhaps.

You’re scared of the anxiety, ever hanging just above your neck like a blade teasing its descent.

You’re scared this is it and that nothing will change. That you’ll remain within this dream, stuck in place while the real world rushes past you, familiar faces of childhood friends and bullies alike now far out of sight.

You’re scared that no one can tell. That you’ve lived with the fear for so long, it has become an indefinable, inseparable part of you. That without its shaky foundation, you will crumble under your own weight. That you have crafted your mask with such finesse, nothing exists underneath it now.

But that’s okay, nightmares are supposed to scare you.

Because this is a nightmare. Isn’t it a nightmare?

—

The night is cold. Rain is heavy on the panes of your bedroom window.

They create a rhythm, one you can follow to allow the burdens of your mind to slough off you. The feeling of the eyes that never turned to you, the sound of the cart wheel that never echoed, the demands of the job that never shackled you, the weight of the anxiety that always crushed you. They all melt away, slowly but surely, even if only for the day.

You close your eyes and slip soundlessly into the peaceful world of dreams and nightmares.