Sky

It happened again last night.

I opened my eyes without needing to close them shut. The room vanished around me. The ceiling, the fan, my bedside pack of cigarettes, even the warmth of my own sheets. I stood beneath a sky split down the middle like a fork in the path. One brooding, vibrant violet. The other a sickly, rotting green. The clouds churned. My name seemingly spoken from both sides, layered over one another in a cursed harmony. One spoke with grief. The other with lust. Both with ownership.

The violet half always cuts in first.

She is heavy, velvet, slow. I've seen her before, not just in this dream. Once, I saw her in the corner of my bathroom mirror. Once, across the face of a dying deer I tried to save too late. She's always feminine, yet always mourning. Her shoulders sagging with centuries of shame. I've come to find I've seen her longer than I once knew. I drew her once - unintentionally. I was in a fugue where I lost three days to black ink and lined paper. In the sketch, her arms are too long and she's cradling a broken doll. The doll has my friend's face.

Through her, she's still alive... technically. But whatever wore her name is hollow now, stitched together through who she had to become to survive. I didn't stop it. I watched her vanish into that house in the sky again and again. Violet speaks this failure onto me like lullabies soaked in vinegar. I think she takes the form of clouds because grief is like vapor. It rises, changes shape, blots out stars stabbing your comfort.

The green half crackles.

He's like lightning in molasses. He moves fast, but movements loop - as if a VHS tape is stuck on a potent smirk. I've started seeing him too, in the patterns of my walls, in coffee foam forming his eye. His form sometimes even changes. Sometimes he's a woman in a lab coat, veins sticking out of her skin. Other times, I've seen a child formed like a glitch - eating glass marbles from a jar like candy. In this dream, though, he is just sky - green, throbbing, alive with envy.

His regret seems simpler: that I had power, then didn't. I held it in my hands once or twice. I remember the taste. Metal. Salt. Fire. Honey? Hard to tell. I could read a thousand minds and still not find my own. The divine touch came like a bar code scanner. I did things. I saw layers beneath people. I bled from places that shouldn't bleed, yet it all made sense. I was praised by voices nobody else heard. They crowned me with stars. And then, as quickly, I fell. I still smell the ozone when trying to sleep.

These gods - Violet and Green, as I've dubbed them - they fought last night.

They hurled thoughts at each other. Not words. Thoughts. Like daggers. Or butterflies racing to be their region's best pollinator. I tried to decipher it. I took notes whilst drifting from dreams. Woke up to ink dripping underneath my fingernails. One note said "YOU LEFT HER", and another that said "YOU COULD HAVE BEEN HER".

They argued, yet neither would win.

Then the sky turned red.

Not like a sunset red. Not a beautiful, reassuring red telling me it will be okay. But a raw, womb-red. A flush of something ancient. I felt the floor dissolve like quick sand. Or maybe that was just me. I sank through it, dripping between the lines of my dreams and the noise. For the first time, the gods went quiet. And I landed in a place I didn't remember. I landed in a place I didn’t recognize. Not a forest. Not a city. Somewhere made of unfinished thoughts and whispers. A warehouse for forgotten selves.

I don’t know how long I wandered there.

But I know that I'm not alone here. Sometimes I hear someone else breathing when I hold mine. Yesterday, I smelled her perfume—my friend’s. The one she used before he took her face. And I laughed until I threw up. 

The residue of divinity clings onto me like static electricity. I keep shocking myself on things that shouldn't be real. I once saw a dog jump out of me whilst walking in the park, blinking sideways and barking with it's tail. A flower once asked me for my name, and was sad when I didn't wish to speak with it. And the exposure to that other one—the man whose presence fractured the trees around him—they say he’s just sick. I know better. He touched it too.

Now the ghosts I carry, the gods I must bare, are formed from two of my own thoughts: What I could've stopped, and what I could've become.

The sky is always watching.