Mr.Sandman

(2) I’m so Alone

I was haunted by his smiles and his looks of distrust.
I was haunted by a man who didn’t even exist. My head thrummed as I sat by the window looking out. I felt like a broken record player.
A little girl drew with chalk on the sidewalk the blocks to play hopscotch. A toddler, who was watching her, looked up at me from his plastic tricycle and gave me a toothy grin.
I waved by curling my fingers, but did not smile.
“So what are you doing?” JoAnna asked timidly and I sighed in to the receiver, the phone lodged between my chin and shoulder.
“Nothing.”
She began talking about school slowly and how she wishes we would have the same classes, the same school and the same year. My responses are accurate and encouraged the mood. After two hours of talking, or listening on my part, she bid farewell, having said her mom called her and I hung up the phone with a last endearment.
My eyes refocused wearily on the outside of the window.
The little girl had grown tired of hopping and had at a determined point, run back into the house and was likely to be watching TV or on the computer.
The toddler had also driven away.
I was alone.
The hopscotch pattern in white had a random flower here and there, the numbers crooked with malpractice and each square was of a different size.
Something suddenly stabbed at my heart. Trying to look down at my chest, the room darkened and the furniture changed. I was stilled with pain. As the room rearranged into a foreign one, panic shot through me.
My dreams were attacking me even while I was fully conscience?
The door opened and slammed shut, the grey silhouette of his shape definitely clear and definitely startled emitted like a light of a flickering candle. He stopped and waited for something.
Hesitatingly.
I looked at my chest and withdrew the hand. It was clean and the shirt intact and laundry fresh. I sighed, slightly relieved.
He crossed the room in his usual long strides.
I gasped, confused and startled. He wore a McDonalds’s uniform with the visor and his eyes sunken in with sorrow.
Unwillingly, my hand lifted, reaching for him.
He stood before me, his fists tight at his sides. He seemed just as unwilling.
He had a nametag, I noticed then, but the quality of the film blurred the detail of the shape of the letters.
It was as if he were real, with a real life and a real job. But his facial features were unmoving and with the ferocity in which the scene appeared, it evaporated, leaving me to wallow in self pity for the remainder of the day in my room.
Unsure how to approach it, I was too afraid to day dream anymore but felt the raw penury to see his face again.

When I faced my fears, I lifted the covers and closed my eyes, bracing to what may come.
But the subtlety in which things appeared were relaxing and at the same time unnerving.
The reel began slower than its usual speed, picking up images of a street lamp on the corner of a London cobblestone avenue at night.
Eager to touch the metal of the lamp post, mesmerized, I walked to it, observing but at the same time not seeing anything different than I had when I was several feet away.
An arm lashes around my stomach, pulling me against the frame of a body roughly and I’m certain it’s him.
I groan aloud involuntarily as a warm wet tongue curves my earlobe and his other arm pulls me tighter to him. My head falls back against his shoulder and I feel the whisker burns coming in.
His footsteps are fast and unsteady like that of a drunken man.
I’m scared but my body is relaxed, bending as he presses me against a brick wall where the lamp doesn’t cast light.
I can hear the zipper of his pants and my breathing becomes rapid. My body is excited about the action to come, but my mind is wailing to the gods to stop.
I did not deserve this.
I could not.
And though I felt the tears well up, none slid down my cheeks as he pushed my legs apart and pulled to a side my underwear.
My body shivered with delight as he filled me, arching my back painfully against the wall.
It was far from tender when after less than a minute’s worth of thrusts he came and unwrapped himself from me. I remained chained to the worn bricks.
I felt the world flip over, and as suddenly, the wall became a floor of sand.
Gulls cried above me and I wanted to drown in the sea.
The waves broke restlessly and after adjusting, I sat up.
On a beach towel and under an umbrella, the sun was scorching. He sat by my side in swimming trunks and salt streaked hair.
He stared into the ocean. The reflection of the sea made green tints in his eyes. My fingertips went cold.
“Talk to me.” I found myself saying.
He glanced at me before digging his feet further into the sand. His voice broke with emotion and baffled me at the new feelings being planted on the pumping veins of my heart.
“Why can’t I have you?”
It may have been what he’d been trying to say all along, but his tone was more anguished than frustrated.
I felt self-conscious and covered my bikini clad body with my arms. I wondered if I had caused the swollen bottom lids of his eyes to darken the way they had.
My imagination was cruel.
My fingers ran across the sand and captured his hand.
He looked down at it.
My only words of assurance I could give, “I love you.” He frowned, turned away and disappeared.
Stricken to find myself alone on the beach in the dream, my mind’s cogs turned dutifully and swept up the scene.
The next film split in the middle several times. The frames shook and finally settled on a shadow cast bed where he and I lay, coiled in each others arms. His hands held my small ones and played with my fingers, bending them, fisting them, and I pressed against him. His warmth was like a lit fireplace on a winter’s day.
A semitransparent sheet clung to our bodies with drying sweat.
His nose nudged around my ear, inhaling the sent of my hair and stroked the muscle of my shoulder.
“Do you know the song American pie?” I murmured, kissing the untanned skin of the inside of his arm.
He nodded slowly and I began to hum.
The mole on the inside of his wrist was the last thing I remembered as I fell asleep in his arms and woke up on my bed, alone.
I searched the bed frantically before I realized it was all a dream.
He was never really there.
Our relationship had shifted into something new when I wasn’t paying attention.
I wanted to go back to sleep and ask him so many things.
I wanted to kiss him and feel the heat of his smile.
I never wanted to wake up.
I punched the pillow and tore at my hair.
“WHY?” I yelled at the air, venting out my frustration to invisible gods.
I needed to know, why?
I spasm with heart ache and fall back unto the mattress, I wanted him with me!
Warmth I wanted to feel from him slipped into tears that rolled red and with the promise of a head ache and more sleep.