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It starts when you’re barely a teenager.
You’ve never had many friends- living on an island does a pretty good job of separating you from people your own age in the real world, and you’re not very good at keeping in touch with people through your computer. You can make friends easily enough through various websites, but internet friendship just isn’t right for you and you end up losing contact after a few weeks because you just don’t feel like it’s all that important.
It always makes you a bit sad, though, and you’ve never been able to figure out why.
When you start having the dreams it makes a little more sense.
You have the first one when you’re twelve and, taking your history of narcolepsy into account, at first you think you’re still sitting at your computer, talking to someone, but not very far into the dream you realize that can’t be true, because the friendship is moving way too fast, and in flashes of joy and pain.
You’ve never clicked this well with any of your internet buddies before, and now it’s not just one but three different colors of text flashing at you from the Pesterchum window and you’re laughing and joking with them easily and smoothly like you’ve been best friends forever and you just can’t imagine dropping contact with these three now because they, blue purple red, are undoubtedly the three coolest humans on the planet!!!
You wake up crying and you’re not sure why. It wasn’t a sad dream at all, on the contrary it was so so happy, but you feel empty and you can’t get back to sleep.
You don’t have such an intensely real-feeling dream for nearly a year, but your periodic naps are interspersed with bits of blue, purple, red, John, Rose, Dave, and flashes of still pictures from online profiles and voices from group Skype calls but you’ve never even installed Skype on your computer because you’ve never had any reason to.
You download it the next time you use your computer even though you know all it will do is take up space.
The next really real dream comes nearly a year later when you’re slightly more angst-ridden and not expecting anything for your birthday because your grandpa is off on another exotic hunting trip and Bec is sweet as ever but dogs, even sweet ones, don’t give presents.
Your mind sends you kind words in blue and red and purple and while you receive them you’re busy cobbling together presents for John and Rose and Dave, the kids in your head, even if they’re really only words and the next day you go down to the sea and put bottles in the ocean with handmade cards inside even though you know they won’t reach the mainland and even if they did, who’s going to read them? Children on the beach, and not even the correct children, not even the kids who you love but you don’t know.
Who you’ll never know, because
They
Aren’t
Real.
You keep telling yourself this and it keeps being true but it doesn’t keep you from waking up gasping and frantically looking out your window on blue text’s, John’s birthday because there should be fire and death and the start of something and oh gosh how exciting!!! You wonder what your friends think of this!!!
But all there is is Bec and your grandfather calling you down for breakfast and though you’re relieved, you can’t deny that you wish there was someone’s birthday to celebrate.
That dream, the one you find yourself referring to as “the meteor dream” is the start of the really crazy ones.
You think it probably doesn’t help that you’ve just started highschool in your homeschooling career so the work has become harder, the books denser, the math more complex, and you go to sleep more exhausted every night. You go to sleep more exhausted and sometimes when you wake up you just lay in bed for an hour going over what’s just happened in your head and that tires you out again.
You die in your dreams sometimes.
Everyone dies in their dreams, you know that- it’s supposed to mean that you’re growing and changing, but you must be doing a lot of growing and changing, and missing a lot of the qualities of the friends that are dying too (because that’s what that’s supposed to mean.)
Sometimes you don’t die, though. Sometimes you’re huge and luminous and hold the universe in your hands and there are at least three people in love with you, probably. Sometimes you press buttons and invent impossible things and sometimes you hold frogs and stand next to red text boy, Dave, and wonder if you’re in love and think you’re not.
Sometimes you shoot Dave in the chest and sometimes you threaten your other friends and sometimes Bec is a hulking monstrosity.
Those are the bad days, those are the days when you shut yourself in your room and don’t let anyone in, not even Bec, not even your Grandfather because when you look at him you see stuffing at the corner of his mouth and when he speaks you hear nothing but the crackle of old dead flies and stitched dry flesh.
When you are 16 a highschool diploma is mailed to you and you start applying for jobs and colleges. You thought about taking online classes at first but your Grandpa insisted that Jade you haven’t been well it’s like you’re wasting away right before my eyes you need to be around people your own age!!! So you get into college for botany and nuclear physics with scholarships (not that you need them with all of whatever your grandpa’s done to make money) and you get a job as a barista at the on-campus coffee shop and things are looking up and you’re seeing a therapist twice a month to discuss these “disturbing visions” and you go home to visit Grandpa and Bec every weekend because it just so happens that your college is 20 minutes from the coast and you’re on medication for your narcolepsy and everything is Just Fine and then you meet a boy who looks like one of the gray, orange-horned aliens that started populating your dreams when you were 14 and you don’t know what to do.
He’s very nice and he’s 17 and in your chemistry class and planning to go to law school and you get to be great friends. His name is Kartik but sometimes you call him Karkat and he pretends he doesn’t mind but you know that people who don’t like you two very much because you’re weird and young and too smart and draw weird stuff call him truckdog sometimes. But that’s okay, right? He would say something if it wasn’t, right?
One night he tries to kiss you and even though you don’t like boys that way, don’t think you like anyone that way really, you close your eyes and you let him and for a moment you’re sure that when you look at him he’ll have gray skin and candy-corn horns.
He has brown skin and a striped beanie.
The next week you tell him you think you two are better as friends and he says okay but it seems like you don’t see him any more and you think maybe he’s avoiding you. That’s fine. You enter your second year of college and make friends with some freshman who are older than you but think you’re cool for being 17 and a sophomore, not weird. One of them is named Kanai and is tall and was born in Africa and you keep calling her Kanaya. She thinks you’re mispronouncing her name (she doesn’t mind, she says she thinks it’s kind of cute, actually) but you know it’s actually just because she looks like jade text and has a scar on her stomach that you’re sure was put there with a beam of wwhite science even though that’s something that even in your dreams you’ve only heard about and besides she says it’s just where she had her appendix removed when she was eight.
You stay in that group of friends for a while, until one day they convince you to go to a party and you have a bit too much to drink and (apparently, you don’t remember it) sit in the corner for the rest of the night sobbing about how many times you’ve died. How many times you’ve killed. A boy in shades who is one of your best friends and who has died more times than you can count.
But you don’t have any dead friends. And you don’t have any live ones now, either, because they’ve all been scared away by the crazy girl who can’t hold her liquor and can’t hold her tongue.
Not having any friends is fine though, really. You start working at a flower shop because it pays better than the campus café and is nicer, too. The shop grows all of its own flowers and though you’re just working the counter and assembling simple bouquets at first, they have you in the greenhouse before long. You’ve always had a natural talent for plants, and the people at the flower shop see it. They joke that your thumb isn’t just green, but magic.
When you graduate you’re offered a permanent position but we know you have a master’s degree in botany Miss Harley so you’re a bit overqualified and I realize you can do better than us! Do whatever you think is best but you can keep the part time position as long as you want!
You start working there full time. It pays well enough to live on and it’s not like you ever really wanted to be a botanist anyway. You’re too much for that. You want to roll through fields of flowers and gather them into your hair. You want to grow the world’s largest pumpkin and carve it to look like something and hope it disappears like it would have if you were in one of your dreams. You don’t want to sit in a lab and dissect petals. That isn’t you, at least not right now. Maybe never, but never is a long time away, you think.
Your grandpa dies when you’re 3 years out of college. A hunting accident, the man on the phone says. You told him to stop messing with guns when you were a teenager for god’s sake and now look where it’s got him-
Do you want the body, the person on the phone says. It’s a bit messy but nothing a good mortician can’t fix, you could still have an open casket.
You’re better with a needle and thread than any mortician is and it’s a tradition.
Traditions are made to be broken.
No, you don’t want the body, but please I’d like to pay my respects so don’t do the cremation until I can see him-it- one last time.
You pick up Bec and the things you left behind when you went to school from the island and you spread your Grandfather’s ashes on the beach. You consider selling the house, but that would mean selling the hunting trophies first and you don’t want to deal with that and you don’t think your grandpa would have wanted you to do it anyway so you just leave it. You can always move back in if things ever get hard.
The dreams sort of stopped in your final year of college, but they come back now and they make you distracted as all hell even with the therapy and the sleeping pills that are supposed to give you a deep, dreamless sleepjust like it says on the box and sometimes you forget to feed Bec until he’s whining at your breakfast and sometimes you forget to feed yourself breakfast at all and sometimes (and this is the most common of every “sometimes”) you forget to take any of your medication and your narcolepsy takes over and you fall asleep at work.
Your work itself is suffering too; you can never remember which flowers you watered because sometimes you look at them and the petals remind you of spirographs and maybe faces and you stand staring at one for an hour until someone either notices or tells you off. The tellings-off are more common now.
When you’re 26 you lose your job. They say they’re very sorry but they have to let you go- they just don’t know what happened, you used to be so alert and happy all the time. We hope things look up for you but we just can’t afford to employ you any more.
You get a job at a library because at least that’s just organization and things, and you even pick up some light reading there if something looks interesting. One book is by an R. Lalonde, and you’re halfway through before you realize one of the characters sounds like you. Same skin, same hair, same green text.
You want to put down R. Lalonde’s books but they’re far too hauntingly familiar, too you, too –
You can’t put your finger on it but half the cast is composed of gray aliens with candy corn horns and one of them is named Karkat and one is named Kanaya and one night you’re up late reading and you realize that you’re crying and Bec is whining at you, not because you forgot to give him his dinner but because he’s worried about you even though he’s just a dog.
You’re worried about you too.
You take the correct number of sleeping pills but you still dream.
This time, though, it isn’t bad. It’s actually quite nice. The thing is, though, it’s different from usual. It’s not a flashback, your actions aren’t preplanned like they always seem to be. It’s
Well
It’s the only legitimate dream you’ve had in a while.
You’re standing in a field. It’s a field you know well, because it’s on the island where you grew up. The grass and flowers reach up to your knees, swaying in touches of summer wind.
Karkat is with you, and so is Dave. Grey text and red text, and they’re smiling. You look around and realize that outside of your immediate vision, all your friends are there.
Dave takes your hand and suddenly you’re twirling with him, laughing, and before you know it you’re all spinning in a big circle, you and all your friends, and then someone trips and you all fall down in a pile.
Karkat says something and you don’t really hear it all because his voice is garbled, like you’ve forgotten what it sounds like, which is ridiculous because you never knew what it sounded like in the first place, but it’s something along the lines of that it’s lonely without you and everyone, it’s so lonely, and no one can feel except for through dreams and it’s like a hole being torn in his stomach every day.
Teal text, Terezi, rolls over and says something that makes karkat snarl and she cackles and kisses him and you look away.
When you wake up you’re crying and realizing how utterly alone you are. There’s nothing here in this lonely bare room but you and Bec and Bec doesn’t seem to care much for any of it, he’s just a dog after all. Just you and Bec and the pills on the nightstand, the sleeping pills on the nightstand…
You look at the clock, and it’s only 2:30 in the morning. You sigh and reach for the pills and take two, the recommended amount. Take three, the recommended amount. Take 5, the recommended amount. Take
You forget how many it’s been now but you still aren’t sleeping. You want to sleep. You want to go back to that field. You want to see your friends.
The bottle is empty and the dark rolls in.