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You reached out to touch the faceless boy’s brown, soft hair; that was the only prominent detail that ever assembled fully in your dreams. Every night, you dreamt of him and saw only parts of his face and body, but never his entire identity. Sometimes, all you heard was his voice in your dreams echoing in the distance, or his screaming, or even him crying.
There was tremendous joy within the mysterious boy; you felt every bit of it within yourself, but there was pain and pressure too. You didn’t know who he was, but you tried to soothe him of his troubles—to make him happy, to make him laugh...
To make him feel loved.
On the flip side, you felt alone. Insecure. You feared of being forgotten-athazagoraphobia, you think it’s called.
Your dream boy assured you every night that it was going to be okay. You were going to be okay, and he promised to protect you no matter what. He promised that one day, he would find you, and that he would make sure that you would never, ever be alone.
And every night, you always reached out to him, raising a hand out for him to grasp, begging for him to answer your one question:
Who are you?
But your question could never be heard by the boy. A force would always muffle you, mute you to prohibit you from ever asking that question and receiving an answer in return.
Likewise, he would reach for you, and the two of you almost embraced every night, until you always woke up, gasping for air. You sat up from your sweet slumber and reached out beside you in your cold bed for a figure that was never there.
Why do I always dream of you?
“Hey, do you have a pencil I can borrow?”
Everyone was preparing themselves for the math test and it wasn’t uncommon for someone to forget their pencil case, especially on a test day. You glanced over at your beaming classmate and began to analyze his face, wondering why he seemed oddly familiar to you—a strong sense of déjà vu.
Of course he had a familiar face; you saw him every other day in class, but why did something in your soul tell you something else? Why could you hear the thumping of your heart in your ear drums?
Why did something within you tell you to reach out for him?
Ignoring and suppressing your thoughts, you rummaged through your bag and found your one and only extra pencil. You told him to make sure to give it back to you after the test.
“I promise,” he whispered, nodding slightly with a warm smile still plastered on his face.
The two words echoed in your head as if they were spoken in a never-ending cave. They kept repeating and repeating and repeating, bouncing against the corners of your skull. When the test began, you tried your best to finish. You really did.
However, only ten minutes in and all you did was stare blankly at your unwritten test sheets. You raised your hand, whispered to the teacher that you weren’t feeling well, and ran off to the nurse’s office.
After he finished his test, the brown-haired boy made sure he left your pencil on your desk, as he promised.
At your local park in the middle of the night, you sat on top of the monkey bars, dangling your feet from above the ground. Ever since the day of the math test, you’ve been having a hard time sleeping.
Half of it was a conscious choice of not wanting to sleep because you didn’t want to wake up again, searching for a face you couldn’t even see. The other half was fear of going insane—were you really dreaming about someone who was real, or were they just a figment of your imagination? You dropped your head into your palms, holding back an anguished scream and tears over the unknown.
“Y’know, you shouldn’t be out here late at night,” a boy’s voice startled you, almost making you lose your balance on the monkey bars. You readied yourself to run, aware that it was a dangerous hour of the night. You then realized who the stranger was as he stepped under the park light; his iconic red and blue costume could be seen a mile away.
“Don’t you have better things to do, Spider-man?” you questioned with a huff and wariness, as he was still a stranger. The hero shrugged in reply and jumped up to sit close enough to be heard by you, but not close enough to make you feel uncomfortable.
He paused for a moment, looking at you while you dangled your legs with your eyes glued to the ground. “You look like you could use the company.”
“What makes you say that?”
The hero shrugged again, turning his attention away from you and mimicked your expression by staring at the ground as well.
“Just a feeling, I guess.”
“Well, I’m okay,” you lied in annoyance. “Now if you excuse me, I’ll be going now, so run off and save someone who needs it.”
Normally, when you jumped down from the monkey bars, you’d usually have a relatively safe landing. Unfortunately, this time was a complete failure, and you landed on your knees, scraping yourself in the process. You felt even more embarrassed knowing Spider-man witnessed the fall.
Spider-man immediately jumped down to help you up. “Oh my, God! Are you all right?!” he asked before lifting you up with his hand on your shoulder and letting you grasp onto his hand to get up properly.
Instantaneously, a jolt ran through your body the moment you two touched, making you believe you were going into shock.
You felt as if your body was being pulled up from the depths of the ocean; an ocean filled with the long suffocation you went through every night, causing you to gasp for air in a sea of troubles and the unknown.
No more, no more, no more.
The realization enlightened you as you began to see that Spider-man was both the oxygen and the lifesaver to keep your head above the water.
All the memories of your dreams began to materialize in your head crystal clear and everything made perfect sense. Spider-man was the boy of your dreams, and your eternal soulmate.
You looked up at Spider-man with saucer eyes, panting like you had just been awaken from one of your dreams, except this time, someone was there for you to hold.
“You’re-you’re from my dreams!” Both of you exclaimed at the same time while pointing at each other.
“I thought I was going crazy, that maybe-that maybe I’m just dreaming of someone who isn’t real,” your eyes began to water as your body shook unsteadily. He was real. Your dreams were real. Your soulmate was your dream boy and he was alive and breathing and not a figment of your imagination.
“I thought the same,” Spider-man panted just as heavily as you were while he rubbed his hand over his head. “Oh my, God.”
Both of you on the verge of tears embraced each other with the tightest hug of your lives. You truly never felt anymore safer than being in Spider-man’s arms. The tears began to flow after a few minutes, but you didn’t care. You didn’t even care about knowing his identity yet, because all you cared about was finally finding him. Now that he finally found you, the boy wouldn’t dare to let you go. Soon enough, Spider-man decided to lift his mask up part way and you two ended up kissing each other, breathing and taking each other in.
“Screw it,” the masked hero grunted in between kisses before he pulled off his mask entirely, revealing himself to be the same classmate who borrowed your pencil.
“Peter?!” you exclaimed with a surprised laugh, still with tears running down your face. Images of your dreams flooded once more, but now the faceless figure sketched with Peter Parker’s face.
“I-I had a feeling that something was up that day you let me borrow your pencil. Something in me told me to do something about it, but I was so confused and overwhelmed,” Peter tucked some of your loose hair behind your ear, caressing your face in the progress. The moonlight and park lighting shined against his face, which was so beautiful, regardless of the tears running down his face. You smiled, mirroring his own smile, and made note that his smile could truly light up the whole world—at the very least, could light up yours.
“I’m sorry you felt alone, since then, since the beginning… but I’m here now,” Peter leaned his forehead against yours. He whispered gently, “I told you I’d promise to find you.”
The boy of your dreams lifted his hands up to cup your face, tenderly rubbing your cheeks with his thumbs. “I promise to be here for you, just like every night I dreamt about you.”
In between sobs, you stated, “And I promise to be with you, Peter, through everything and through anything.”
Peter pulled you in for another kiss, a kiss that would be the first of many, and definitely not the last.