"But who can decide what they dream?
And dream I do..."
-Taking Over Me; Evanescence
Like Dreaming
And she half listens as they tell her about what happened while she was comatose, as they had put it, and she reasons that it should have been like falling asleep and then waking up on a night when you haven't dreamed. That it should have been all darkness, all nothing, because, as they've told her so many times it's now constantly playing underneath her skin, she had no heart during that era. Only, they don't call it an era, because it all went by so fast, unlike the dragging pastel stained visions she saw.
In a way, it was like dreaming, like dreaming of loneliness personified and given blond hair and blue eyes that matched hers, and she can't help but feel a kinship to this girl, whose fingers are blemished with the colors of the wind dyed with rainbows. This girl who radiates nothingness along with the overwhelming feeling of loneliness, alone in a white room, bright, and pale and oozing nothing and Kairi never thought she'd be sick of white, but she is. This girl was dressed in white too, but it was a white faceted with the same wind rainbow colors that coated her fingers, and lived beneath her fingernails. It was a peaceful kind of white and when Kairi found she couldn't look around the room for one more second she would turn her attention to the girl, distracted and contented by the multi-hued white.
And that was when she would notice the sketchbook lying open in the girl's hands, clenched tightly like a lifeline, which Kairi had no doubt it was. The charcoal, or pastels, or crayons, or colored pencils would always drift across the paper, lingering in places and feather brushing others and Kairi was always fascinated by this. She would feel her fingers start to twitch in longing to lift up an implement and put her soul down on paper next to this girl's, and she had a feeling that it would be eerily similar to the blonde's. And then she would realize what she was seeing, and shock would fill her, followed by warmth flowing through to her toes and her nose and her fingertips and laughter would bubble up in her throat. Because it was her home she was seeing, it was the islands and then she would feel a longing so powerful she put a hand to her chest as if that could stop the pain, and jerked her eyes away to the nothing walls.
It was always the same, but it felt so new every time, the painful longing and disgust of the white nothing walls. It felt so good to wake up, so refreshing for a split second before she realized what was happening in front of her eyes. But now that she has time, now that they're free, that they're home, that they're safe and sound and back where they belong, now she wonders on what happened to that girl, because she can feel that this girl is real, knows that she's out there somewhere. And sometimes, when she's back in class, wondering how they went from saving worlds to being ordinary high school students, sometimes her hand twitches with the familiar desire to put her soul on paper, and sometimes she allows it, and watches as blank walls and a small girl gripping her sketchbook come into being.
It was a lot like dreaming, Kairi reasons, like dreaming of nothingness personified, except there's so much there that it's impossible she's merely nothing, so much that it fills blank page upon blank page with ideas, with soul, with heart. And maybe, Kairi reasons, maybe it wasn't dreaming at all.