Dreaming Athena

Athena blinks, half awake, and blurring dim, streaming moonlight with teary eyes. There is a dream, gauzy and wandering, left in the remnants of her memory. It spills around her like a shattered flute of wine, blood red and jagged with twinkling bits of glass. She breathes deep and her back arches. Blankets fall from her, unspooling from her body onto the floor. There is sweat on her forehead, dark blond hair matted to her face. She still hears the whispered words, ghostly and unwanted: "I love you, I love you, I love you." There is an illusory cooling kiss, fresh on her cheek, and she unconsciously bats at it, trying to shoo it away like it were a fly or a gnat. The world is swirling, lush and unwieldy above her. She struggles for her bearings, digs long fingers into the sheets and mattress and fights against another wave of slumber. She tries to open her eyes wider, to breathe and come to, but the force of her exhaustion is too much to overcome. The weight of it pulls down her eyelids, drags her back into the folds of her bed. She pushes back.

She fails.

The darkness drapes over her as mind slips the boundaries of rationality. The voice returns, calling out its affection as she spirals into another fit of sleep. Still slightly aware, she sings back at it, louder than it, hoping to drown it out. But it meets her, note for note, decibel for decibel, drilling inside her dreaming skull and filling it with a cacophony of affection. Even here, even in the wilds of her subconscious, she won't accept it. She can't accept it. There's a guilt that shrouds her, a painful unwillingness to allow any measure of abandon. Her will is stronger than her want, and so she pushes and pushes and pushes the voice aside. But she feels so strangled by it. She feels so unearthly and sad. Sleep finally settles back in, and she wades with trepidation into greater depths, afraid that she will be unable to maintain her defense. As sleep takes hold she takes form and a new pair of eyes takes over. She is seeing things that aren't really there.

She recognizes the room, but she can't say from where. It is an amalgam, a conglomerate of places... a window from an old apartment, her childhood bed, posters from her dormitory, a sleeping cat that's been dead for years. The walls shift in color and size. It's disorienting and a little scary. So she sits, and she floats... the floor is electric blue liquid. She is aloft, hovering above it, cross-legged and dressed in a gossamer nightgown. She knows she is dreaming. It's all too unreal, too fluid to exist anywhere else. She takes in a deep breath and it smells like wasp and butter. She holds the air in her lungs, closes her dream-eyes, and lets the world go black. But it never does. On the backs of her false eyelids are cinema screens, and film rolls through some projector in the back of her brain. Light flickers inside of her, and a scratchy soundtrack hiccups and spurts. Floating in this unreal room, her unreal eyes shut tight, she sees herself in luscious black and white, beautiful and calm and pale, standing in a field of colossal honeysuckle. The dreaming Athena is envious of her celluloid counterpart. She has never felt as serene as she looks in that field. And behind her, on film, a shadow gathers up and extends whispering tendrils around her middle. And the tendrils congeal into arms, and the smoke fills itself in, slowly, like a time lapsed paint by number kit, and there is a boy, then, vague and simple and reaching his lips to her ear. He gently bites, and she practically melts.

In the unreal room she throws open her eyes and disrupts the movie. She is flustered. She falls from her floating position onto the electric ground below. And when she does, there is a thunder clap and the ground is hardwood and the room is static and dull. She's lost it, that brief hint of dreaming magic. As she stands up, dusts herself off, and redresses herself in something heavier, something more substantial, she tries to shake the image of the boy. The lines of her world become thicker, heavier, greasepaint black and stark. She tries to drain herself of color, of worry, of thought. But the image remains. It sticks with her, and as she tries to avert her mind from thinking on it, it just grows inside of her. She can feel the thought of him glowing somewhere deep in her heart and she growls. She hates this. She hates it more than she could describe. With every slow motion blink of her eyes, the boy appears, animated like in an old kinetoscope.

And so she slumps herself down into the heavy drawn world, somehow, now, on an abandoned sidewalk in a crumbling gray block in an anonymous city. The lamp posts are sketched in, messy, curlicued and French. The sky is crackled paint. The buildings are cut from monochrome wallpaper samples. She lays on the concrete and looks up at a flock of wind-up crows skittering by, sending flakes of the heavens down on her like lead-based rain. Pieces of it get stuck on her eyelashes. She blinks them out and tries to clear her mind. From the ground, asphalt arms wrap around her again. They are warm, suddenly flesh, and she's embraced again. She wants to not want it. She wants it to not be so comforting. She wants it to not be so inviting. But it is. She tries to hold fast, to fight it. But she doesn't want to.

The voice is there again. "I love you, I love you, I love you."

And she almost says it back, but the alarm clock wakes her right up.