( waking )
She sleeps.
The cold hand on her forehead is soft and feather-light and it is like light in a heavy way, like fingers curled over a flashlight so that red shines through each one and burns through the creases.
She sleeps.
The cold hand on her forehead is not so soft now, not so gentle. Inside it is dark and on fire. She feels like she is dying. Her own funeral pyre; the encasement of her body. A coffin of flame.
She is sleeping.
She does not dream.
The hand is her lifeline. It is not so cold now, or gentle, or soft, or safe. But it is dangerous to become unaware of the hand that is pressed there against her forehead, dabbing and stroking and the voice that whispers and coos her name as though from a million miles away.
Because when she forgets that the hand is there all is a void, a void burning up in the darkness that flays her alive. She is heavy and roasting and cold. Her every skin-cell aches and bristles.
Because when she forgets that the hand is there, she is not connected, she is not whole, she is not a part of herself. She forgets.
She is asleep.
The hand now is hard and weighted, a thousand pounds bearing down so that under the pressure she suffocates, but never struggles. The hand is clammy and finicky and will not stay in one place. She is grateful, because her skull is caving in beneath it, throbbing and pounding and bursting with fire.
The bubbles underneath her skin move like boiling glass, like pearls and blisters. They disappear into her veins. She is disappearing. She cannot breathe.
But finally she dreams.
In her dream she sees a woman who is tall and long and misshapen, like a willow swaying back and forth above her. The woman's face is white and the eyes are dark, pink lips a worried line that presses, presses, cracks. Waves of slippery dark hair. Long arms reaching out to hold her. The hand removes itself and the image shakes like milk from a surface, and then breaks, fading. . . Farther and farther away from the dream and the darkness. . . .
And the hand is gone.
She wishes that perhaps it wasn't.
Because now she forgets- everything- and everything
Is fading
To black.
She sleeps no more.