"Sleep"

I slept so deeply. More deeply than I had in months, in an eternity. But it was a deep slumber that belied the terror that lay in waiting. The dream was a pseudo-memory filled with falsehood and truth, a fantasy mixed with pleasures and nightmares of a future past or a future to come or a future never to be realized. But no worse a thing was the role I played with no choice: that of omniscient spectator. I think now that gods, all-knowing and omnipresent, are beings to be pitied, for they bear the weight of not only what is and what was, but of what will be—and the variegated colors of chaos of known-unknowns. The sleep and the dream that I endured, helplessly, though deep and uninterrupted (unlike in nigh on all previous instances), was a manifestation of all that I feared but knew to be truth. All that I knew was just waiting to come, one fateful day in the waking world.

M. M.