Sixteen was supposed to be an excellent year, one filled with sweetness and newfound freedom. A license. Possibly a car. Two years away from becoming a legal adult. It was almost the prime of the teenage years, and for me, it was hardly that.

Sixteen was a year overshadowed in darkness, and halfway through my year of being sixteen, I laughed at it all- a dark, exasperated laugh. I should have known sixteen would be a bad year. I should have known as soon as I had my second- and final- dream a week after I turned sixteen.

It was any other night, and the day was tiring, having gone out with friends to the movies and hung out at Jenna’s house for the weekend day. I was home and ready for a nap, my sixteen year old self brandishing ginger curls that took nearly an hour to perfect and the perfect winged eyeliner that could have taken just as long if I hadn’t made my mother do it for me.

I undid it all, regrettably as I wanted to continue staring at myself in the mirror due to a rare moment of high self esteem, and after a minty brush of teeth in the bathroom connected to my room, adorned with posters of waterfalls and forests, I closed my eyes to sleep. Tomorrow was another day off from a day as a sophomore in high school, and I was ready to make it mine- take a hike in the winter woods.

The world faded to dark as the call of sleep took me, and I knew before I went that in what seemed like mere seconds, my eyes would awake to daylight streaming through the blinds, lighting up the floating dust like dull glitter in the air, and my day would begin.

But that wasn’t what happened.

I awoke, but I wasn’t in my bed, nor was I in my home. In fact, I couldn’t even tell if I was in my own world because the very air of it felt wrong. Everything about where I awoke felt like something was missing, and because of it, the air couldn’t settle, its very presence disturbing to my skin.

My eyes darted around the room, meeting with a white ceiling, adorned with ribbons of red silk slashing across, hanging low as decoration, and when the fading of the world started to clear, I could feel the sensation of hard pressure on my neck, pressing at me, and the desperate galloping of my heart screamed a struggle, and my eyes turned to meet a shadow standing above me.

I saw him, and he saw me. A boy with pale blue eyes, widening like the moon, and short cut brown hair, and after that split second of our meeting, his hands recoiled and he stepped back, his wide eyes never blinking, never ceasing their stare. The air around me touched my lungs again, and I didn’t cough, nor did I move. My body felt sluggish and as heavy as a rock, and all I did was stare at that boy, breathing in rapid, quick successions, trying to regain the air he attempted to stole.

My mind was in a daze, and everything around me felt sharp edged with panic, but for some reason, I couldn’t do anything but stare, my heart pounding along with the quick rise and fall of my chest.

He looked much older than me, and he looked as if he’d seen a ghost, looking at me, but before I could even open my mouth to speak- to ask what was going on- my vision started to blur around me, as if water flooded the room, everything waving and wishing around, spinning with a clouded fog shrouding the invisible glass window between me and the world.

A dismembered voice called in the distance, but it sounded buried and bubbled out, calling through the water but never travelling through, as if it weren’t water but instead syrup, encompassing the sound and protecting it from my ears. The figure turned and walked towards it, disappearing from the blur of the room, and everything faded black.

It felt like he’d succeeded and I had died, but I was very much alive as I jerked forward in my own bed- with my own blue flowered comforter and light blue sheets- and the Niagara Falls poster stared back at me, watching in utter silence as I sucked in breath, glancing around frantically for any sign of the boy who had tried to kill me.

A dream. It was all a dream. It had to have been because it wasn’t the first I’d experienced one. Just the second. Something too realistic, something in a room adorned with red silk ribbons, and each time, there was a boy with dark hair, but this time, they weren’t the same.

This boy didn’t have eyes of golden brown with specks of gold. They were blue. And he tried to kill me.

The ghost of a hand haunted my neck, the memory of his fingers digging into it, pressing against with all his pressure, cutting off any airway and gradually ending what was a life.

It was only a dream, I constantly whispered to myself. Just a dream. Just a dream.

But why did it feel so damn real?