It started with a dream.

The ear splitting sound of sirens wailed in the background and blue and red lights blended together blotting out the surrounding scenery. Passersby dawdled. Some stood on tiptoes to get a closer look, others pulled out their phones to record. Police shouted in every direction. Dogs barked as the commotion grew louder, and the nosy residents sneakily peeked out from behind half-drawn curtains. So much was going on at once but he couldn’t make sense of any of it. 

No, how could he?

He was focused on one thing and one thing only. 

The young man’s eyes trembled and his heart beat faster with each passing second as the man in front of him screamed. Hateful curses full of all the despair in the world were thrown at him in a manic raving, the man’s hands were clumsily clutched around a common old kitchen knife that just seconds prior had been swung in his direction.

The hatred emanating off of him was so palpable you could almost touch it.

“I HATE YOU IHATEYOUIHATEYOUIHATEYOU!!!!” The man spat out vitriolic words, snot and tears running down his scrunched up face.

“...”

The young man couldn’t say anything. He recognized it was a dream and yet, the same feelings from back then awakened within him making him nearly forget the fact. His heart ached with anxiety, his mind went blank, and a cold sweat ran down his forehead. 

‘I’m sorry.’ 

Clenched tightly at his sides, the young man’s hands were trembling. He moved his mouth to voice his regret, yet he was unable to produce even a single sound. His thoughts would never reach their intended audience even if he said them now, but he desperately wanted to say those two words to him anyway. 

It all happened because of him. If only he had noticed sooner when things went wrong. There was no one in the world that wouldn’t hate him for what he had done. 

Right?

As waves of regret and uncertainty consumed him, his head began to throb painfully. He could feel the scene slipping away from him and he helplessly wrestled with the air trying to hold onto it. 

‘No! At least let me see it through to the end just this once!’

But the words of his old friend, like a curse, exhausted him, tore him apart, and threatened to consume him without him being able to voice his plea. 

Then the world cut to black.

In an instant, it was just him and the man in front of him.

His old friend. 

A large, terrifyingly familiar grin was plastered on his face, staring back at him in the darkness, his hands were still firm on the knife, and his knuckles white as a sheet from the force.

‘No, not yet.’ The young man's pupils were shaking as he looked at his face, and then, his expression contorted in horror at the scene unfolding before him.

The skin of his hands and face began to melt, merging his body with the weapon in his hands as the world twisted and turned around his silhouette. He merged with the surroundings in an instant. The edge of his dreams and ‘—’ became one, full of unpatchable imperfections, ‘—’ had become something else entirely, indiscernible, indescribable. The world wiggled like it was alive, squelching and creaking with every movement and engulfing him in a sickening cacophony.

‘Stop it!’ He tried to look away, to scream, to do anything but he couldn’t. This was all inside his head and yet he couldn’t do a damn thing by his own will.

The events from ‘that day’ were mixing together as they flashed by him in the hellish landscape, his memories conjoined, twisted, and faded away until he was cradled in his own arms on the floor, eyes glaring up at the being in front of him.

He couldn’t fix this mess. Only bits and pieces of what really happened that day managed to leak through but the full story would never emerge for him, not like this. Locked away in his subconscious, they continued to haunt him without release whenever he dared to dream. 

Whenever he did try to access the memories, it was like the surface of his mind was covered in untangleable strings which kept him from crossing that one last boundary. He could feel his heart tear into a million pieces, his head would throb in defiance, and his body ached all over.

“It’s all your fault.” ‘—’ spoke at the moment his racing thoughts reached their peak.

It came out like a whisper, but he could hear it from every direction like an echo, unable to block it out with his hands. The distress and heartache that the original speaker conveyed was missing but he was unable to remove the images flashing through his mind at the words, regardless of who said them or how.

That’s right.

‘It is all my fault.’

He was merely a hopeless observer, unable to fight back, unable to look away, unable to scream.

Just like back then.

The grotesque figure morphed back into his old friend, a gentle smile full of satisfaction plastered on its face before disappearing. He could control his body now, and using that newfound freedom, he hugged his knees and buried his face in them just as the blaring lights and noisy chaos began anew. 

The young man instinctively knew what was going to happen. This was the first time his dream had gotten this far since it first began a year ago but he knew, and he couldn’t bear to look at the scene awaiting him.

Not again.

He could feel its pull with every moment of resigned resistance, it was calling to him, and unfortunately, he didn’t have much of a choice. The pull only became stronger, and, like a sailor being lured into the sea, his barely regained control was taken from him as he lifted his head from behind his only sanctuary and looked ahead, unable to resist the siren's call. 

His heart halted in his chest. He was struck with an intense feeling of vertigo and the world seemed to tilt around him. His eyes shook.

But he couldn’t look away.

It wasn’t what he was expecting after all. Instead of the body of his old friend lying on the concrete, what he saw was himself, laying still as stone and cold as ice, ‘his’ eyes devoid of the tell-tale signs of life.

Instead of disgust he felt guilty, as the pungent smell of blood hit his nose and he looked at his very own corpse in horror. Blood pooled out from ‘his’ throat, open from the jagged cut of a knife. That noxious grin was left plastered on ‘his’ otherwise lifeless face, as though ‘his’ last moments were nothing but joyful. 

Images flashed by yet again and people were yelling all around him yet he couldn’t process any of it. It all blurred together and his senses dulled, becoming an intangible mess.

For the first time, he felt like he could finally voice his thoughts his vocal cords struggled to voice out the question, after countless nightmares he could finally ask–

“Was it really–?”

‘My fault.’

But he was cut off by the grating sound of his own alarm startling him awake and the pounding of his own restless heart before he could finish. 

*BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEE—*

*Click*

The blaring alarm rang out in the empty apartment, and an auburn-haired young man woke up with a start. He stopped the alarm out of habit as he tried to wrangle his beating heart and flowing tears to a stop.

“It was just a dream.”

'Just a dream...'