As minutes walked on, deep pockets of sleep started at the back of
my eyes, enlarging, expanding until they threatened my grip on reason
and consciousness. My head felt so heavy upon my shoulders that I was
doubtful if it was my head at all. It weighed a ton. It didn't occur to
me how feeble my struggle was in the face of this enemy. This enemy who
offered me a state of insensibility that seemed such a sweet escape to
oblivion. I was tempted. My eyelids were drooping down, obscuring my
view of the tree and the front door. I was certain I just needed to know
where they came. Only then I could finally give in. yet, moments
later, sleep already won over the self, leading me by the nose to some
place different from the cold wall and top base of the stairs. My head
was haphazardly tilted to one side, my lower back numbed to excess, my
feet cold and my mind in anarchic disconnections. I was in a deep stupor
and at the mercy of my dreams. In dreams, I have often known, lucidity
was a lost, absent gift.
In this space, I felt
the wings of the wind, the rush it gave me as it ran against my skin,
sprinting from my arms and legs. And I wanted to run forever just to
feel the exhilaration that it gives me. Yet in pseudo-reality, a
perpetual black cloud of anxiety continued to hover overhead. There was
no arousal of recognition, yet the air grew heavy with the weight of it.
I turned then to see a pair of white birds. It seemed a normal sight,
but my stomach began to churn nervously until a shot thundered through
the air, shattering the idyllic atmosphere that had barely started to
envelop the space. I squinted my eyes to see the trespasser. A huge,
beefy man with a holster strapped to his side and a gun in his hand. He
was laughing, letting out loud roars of hilarity that made me
inexplicably angry. When I turned back to see what had befallen the love
birds, I was stunned. The two were bleeding, but only one had an
apparent wound. As I shuffled closer, I was inextricably amazed and a
little afraid of what I saw. The wound was profusely bleeding, but the
harmed creature seemed to feel no pain. Instead, one looked
incredulously healthy as the other, except for the crimson spots on
their once pristine feathers. You wouldn't even know they've been shot
at.
However, I noticed something different. There
was a wicked gleam visible in their eyes – a nasty sheen of malice and
viciousness, even making them shine brighter. They started poking each
other, their sharp beaks digging deep, the webbed feet coming up in the
air to kick and injure. It was vile. The attacks demonstrated a
nauseating display of cruelty to the self and to the opponent. They were
bathing in an obscene parody of love, except that their embrace spelled
death and destruction. And everywhere they went blood spurted, turning
the battlefield into a graveyard. The space obliterated any reminder of
the living world and I felt like someone suffocating and drowning
without a lifeline in sight. A desperation seized hold of me,
strangling my neck like a hangman's noose. I knew I should have stopped
them. But I couldn't even trod near them until the battle reached a
crescendo, and so I, in my blotched self trembled at the edge to await
the victor.
The space started to fall away. It
was stripped layer by layer, pulled from the sides of my brain. I was
blinking the mist of sleep from my eyes, trying to ascertain what had
pulled me from my alternate universe. I stood up rubbed my eyes, walked
across the room to sleep.
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