mihatenuyume
"There is nowhere left to hide
There is nothing to be done
No people to be saved...
I need to lose to make it right
I'll confront the stars tonight
I will babble, I will bite
You'll never know how much you shine..."
--Bush
I had a dream. Even now I don't know if it was a good dream or bad. It just was.
In my dream, you were a princess, and in my dream, you died. And in my dream if I held out my hand I could touch you, and you would be there if I woke up in the dark and said your name...
But I don't know. Maybe this is the dream.
*
This is a story that never happened. Once upon a time, there was a prince who lived in a world where all the girls were princesses. Because he knew they were all princesses, and spent all his time saving them, they could never be anything else. But the prince fell ill from all the work he did, and his sister, trying to protect him, made him stop. She saved him, and so the girl he loved the most of all the girls in the world could never be his princess. A princess can't save a prince, after all. That's just not the way things were done in this world. And so she had to become a witch, since witches were the only things girls who weren't princesses could be. And the world flung its hate on her, for having the nerve to put herself between it and its beloved prince, and for being a witch instead of a princess, and all the hatred did something horrible to her... and it changed her...
The prince was tortured by his sister's pain, and he was afraid it was his fault; too late he realized that he had made this world and the laws that had brought down her punishment, building it all out of love for his sister, but not knowing that his dream had twisted into a prison and it had trapped them both. And his sister's change took its toll on him, as well. Princes, after all, were supposed to hate witches, since that was just something princes did; and slowly, all the hatred and confusion began to pull him under... and the war between the part of him that still loved her for who she was and the part of him that was forced to hate her for what she was twisted him into two halves. The other half, the dark one, rose up in anger at them both, blaming the witch for their imprisonment even as he loved her with his own twisted sort of heart; and understanding nothing but his rage, he became the boundary of their world, a border they couldn't possibly escape. He was the End of the World.
Knowing that they were both in danger, unable to save his sister by himself, the prince went out in search of someone who could help them -- and he found a little girl who very much needed something to believe in, a little girl who had lost everything, who had more love in her than the world could possibly take. He showed the girl his sister's plight, and chose her to help them both; he gave her a token that would protect and guide her, and left her to make her own journey, praying for her strength. But the prince's own time had run out, and the dark twin found him... and End of the World killed the prince, and claimed the world and the witch for his own.
And so the little girl, the only one who could break out of this prison where girls had to be princesses or else be hurt for being witches and whose eggshell wall was a man who could smile like a fallen angel, the little girl who was the only one who could love a witch with all her heart... this girl became a prince. Not a princess, or a witch, but a prince; because that was the only way to change the world. And she found the witch, at last, even though she no longer remembered what she'd been looking for, where the witch was being used in End of the World's confused and deluded attempts to break out of the prison... and the prince's love, in the end, brought her through the last door and let her find the girl who had been trapped inside the witch so many years ago...
But in the end, it couldn't have worked, because the witch-girl fell. In the end, not even this girl could possibly be a prince, because she was too weak, and she didn't understand anything in time. In the end, she failed.
In the end, you died. And it was my fault.
*
And then I woke up.
*
Everything I see seems to bring back a little shower of dream-memories. You know how when you had a really vivid dream, and you know you did but you can't remember what it was about, sometimes you'll see something and it'll give you just a little twinge of deja vu, and you know something like that was in the dream but you don't know how? That happens to me all the time now. Lying in my bed at night, I think I can remember something about a bed in my dream, that was shaped strangely, and I think I remember you being there too, even though I don't think we slept together. Walking back to my empty room in Higashi-kan, I think I remember that in my dream the whole dorm was empty, and crumbling like no one had been there for a long time, even though that's ridiculous; there are more students every year, and the Academy needs all the housing it can get. I look out across the central courtyard, and I remember a greenhouse that was never there, full of roses, and you turning to smile at me there with a watering can in your hand; and in the shower, I see the puckered, ugly scar under my ribs, and I remember your arm around me, your hand soft over my heart, as your other hand drove the sword that left that mark into my back. I could almost hear your voice, while I was thinking about it. Watching my left hand as it closed my door, the morning after I woke up from the dream, I remembered a ring on my finger, but not what it had looked like, or what it meant. I think a prince gave it to me. A handsome prince on a white horse, or something like that. Isn't that silly?
No, I guess maybe it isn't.
*
From the morning after the dream, it's been like the volume was turned down on the world. Everything's faded and dry and voices are hard to hear, and there don't seem to be any colors anywhere. It's like living too close to the sun. I got up, finally starting to remember the real things, that there was a world outside Ohtori Academy, and that I was a normal girl who didn't wear strange clothes or do much of anything strange, and that there was a normal student council who met in a regular academic room in a class building, and that my best friend Wakaba lived just down the hall...
I knocked on Wakaba's door not long after dawn, I guess because I just needed someone to tell me I was really here and not still dreaming. Or just starting to dream. She opened the door half-asleep and yawning and grumbling, but she hugged me and took me in and and gave me some tea when I told her I'd had a bad dream, and that was better. She told me to tell her what it was, and I looked at the side of her face in the early morning light from the window, and suddenly I thought I remembered her in some kind of uniform with a sword to my throat and hate in her eyes, but then I shook my head and it was gone.
I told her I couldn't remember any of it.
And I think even as I was asking it I knew what she would say, but I couldn't help it. I had to know, at least. Wakaba, have you seen Himemiya? I asked.
She frowned, cradling her teacup. Himemiya? she said.
Himemiya, I said, helplessly. Even though I knew. Himemiya Anthy.
Wakaba shrugged, drinking her tea. There was a phoenix crest embossed on the top of the doorjamb, I suddenly noticed, like there was in my room, and I wondered why it seemed like it should be a rose. What did roses have to do with Ohtori Academy?
Who's that? Wakaba said. Is she new? You know a lot more people than I do.
Never mind, I said. I just feel a little weird, I guess. Just... never mind.
We went to class that morning, through the rising phoenix under the embossed kanji that's engraved on the doors to the arts and sciences building. And it was a day just like any other day, I suppose. Except somehow I didn't know what any other day was supposed to be like. Maybe there was something else that should have happened, that I couldn't remember.
*
I know it must have just been a dream. I know I must have dreamed you, that you can't have existed. I know it couldn't have happened, because things like that don't happen, not in the real world. Only in stories. And stories aren't real.
But what about the people in them? Aren't they real, ever? Couldn't they become real, just once, or are they always just someone's dream, no matter how much you want them to appear? Even if you love them, love them more than anything real, so much you think your heart will fall apart? Can't a dream come true? Just once?
Please?
*
Walking back to my room tonight, I can see almost the whole Academy from the hill the class buildings are built on. It's pretty, I suppose, with the sunset light spilling over the trees and the grass and turning them orange, and the wild flowers by the path just beginning to blossom. It's spring, and everything is becoming new again. I look for a rosebush, just one little patch of wild roses, in the flowers scattered over the ground; it's becoming habit by now. But there aren't any, and I know there won't be, no matter how long I look. Roses just don't grow here. The weather is wrong.
It is pretty, and it's a perfectly nice school to go to, and perfectly normal. Normal just like everything.
I've been wondering what normal really means, lately.
As I pass an open door, leading down to a bank of lockers, and see the way the setting sun hits the back wall, I stop, and frown. Something about shadows falling across that wall, at sunset... except they weren't really shadows, and they didn't really fall, were the only ones who never fell, not without meaning to...
Then Wakaba asks me what's wrong, and I blink, and it's gone.
Someday, I guess I'll forget the rest, and I won't think of it anymore. Maybe I'll even forget you. I wish I could say it'd be better that way, but I can't. Forgetting would be the worst thing of all.
We go home.
*
I don't sleep much anymore. When I can, though, I always pray as I'm sliding under that I'll dream, but I never do.
I don't care if this is real; it still isn't what I want. I know this is a normal life I'm living now, the kind I always wanted, and I know I'd throw away a hundred different kinds of normal now just to see your face one more time. I'd do it without even thinking.
But I can't go back. Not now.
*
Have you ever woken up from a nightmare and not been able to believe that you were awake and that it was over, that you were really safe? It was like that. I sat up, I think, and I might even have screamed; I don't remember. For a little while I didn't even know where I was. In bed, of course, but it didn't seem like it was any bed I'd ever seen before. I called out to you, but you weren't there; it was just me, in my own bed, in my single dorm room, that of course I'd had all year. And I tried to remember who I was and where I was and what was real but all that would come was your face, streaming tears as you fell to nowhere, and more swords than I could count flying in like a swarm of bees...
So I did what anyone would do. I curled up under the covers and waited for morning.
And by the time the sun came up, it was almost gone, and all that was left was this. This life I have now.
This is what's real. This is reality. This is the truth, and this is all there is.
It was just a dream.
And now I'm awake.
*
And now I'm standing in front of the mirror in my little bathroom, just looking at the sad, tired, empty stranger's face in the mirror, and trying to remember the way it used to be. I'm just trying to figure out why I feel this way, trying just to remember the way I was before I had this dream. Or the way it was in the dream. I don't know anymore. I don't know what I want.
It was just a dream. That's all it ever was. And in it maybe I was different, and maybe everything was different, and maybe things happened that didn't make any sense and maybe I knew a girl and I loved her more than anything, but she was never real, and you were never real, never. never. never. So why, how do I miss you?
I pull at my hair a little, looking at a strand. A mass of blonde hair I don't even know what to do with. And for a second it seems wrong... it seems like it didn't used to be like that... I think, maybe, it was...
It's no use. I can't. I just can't.
I got a pair of scissors out of my desk when I came home, and now I hold them up to the light, and they look pretty sharp. I think they could probably cut through a lot of things. That's good, because I can think of some things I'd like to cut.
This is what really happened. Once upon a time there was a girl who went to sleep one night and fell into someone else's dream. This wasn't so unusual, because we all do this at some point or another, but in the dream the girl started to love a character from someone else's imagination, and when she woke up she couldn't let go. She stopped being able to remember what was real and what wasn't, and she started to want the dream more than being awake. Until she thought she'd do anything to go back to sleep. But she was trapped in reality, just as much as the dream world had been a trap, and there was only one thing to do.
I bring the scissors up, and bring the blades apart, and then I cut.
As my hair piles up in the sink, it looks like cornsilk. Not like roses, or like anything else. It's just hair, after all.
And I'm not dreaming anymore.