The truth is, I’m scared to be someone else’s nightmare.

I’ve featured in that dream before. The one where I walk into your sleep like The Sandman and crush, slowly, reassuringly, everything you ever knew to be true about how strong your heart is – it’s not. It’s fragile, and fickle, and illogical.

Someone thinks I’m a reckless perpetrator of soul abuse; that I play them like violins, symphony, make all the fortified armour around it paper thin.

I’ve been that before, in another’s subconsciousness, wielding powers I knew I had but never wanted to use – riding a black horse of certain death. Always a black horse.

I’m scared that you are my spectre, and me giving you me will result in a dead zone where normal things happen very often – normal being white lies and black lies on black horses and no sweet serenity. No happy ending. Just my heart. Throbbing the way it is now, raw, the last of its veins spurting out the last of my blood on the very last frontier of what I know to be real.

And yet I give you me. I know no other way to prove myself. The fear of you chokes me but the fear of myself finishes the job. They link hands and walk into the sunset, smiling, my demons serenading their romance. I don’t know why you want this. I don’t know what this is and if Dreamland is my future. But I’m going to trust you and go to sleep anyway.

tSN