Dream of The Watches

I dreamed a dream in the watches of the night. Of deceit, of red hourglasses, and the fragile cobwebs of life that keep us breathing.

But despite the three, Death plagues me the most.

She doesn’t let me sleep.

And when she does, it’s not sleep at all, but merely a coma of nightmares.

Like a pale moon on sundry horizons, she glares through my window, through the shades, and keeps me up through the witching hour, when the nightcrawlers creep. The widow of my vision spins a threaded web across my field of sight, rendering me in states of sleep only to haunt my dreams. Her shrieks slaughter me, echoing her serenade of bereavement to me in every dark pitch. I can hear it. I can feel it; her tiny legs skulking about my body so I can’t move, my lungs so I can’t breathe, my heart so I can’t live.

It’s terrifying.

And when I awake, she still remains, a shadow of what is to come.

“Leave me alone!” I scream, but she poisoned my tongue so my only declaration is that of a desolate cynic, one who solely mocks reason with questions of the heart instead of proclaiming the fear possessed—the fears that possess me. I’m up for hours upon hours upon hours, the sands of the red hourglass pouring out into another vat of wasted time.

But I can’t speak.

I try, but I can’t, and it’s choking in its own, sickening way; the knowledge that I’m imprisoned in my own private abode is unbearable.

And even if I could speak, the widow would not hear me, for she gave up all feeling for that hexed red hourglass so long ago. “It was a trade worthwhile,” she muses in my ear, injecting her bane. “All feeling, all sense of life, both for the red hourglass. All for the red hourglass.”

“Taste the venom,” she hisses, “for it will give you the freedom you long for.”

She knows it, I think. She knows I want freedom. She knows I trifle with thoughts of Death and the release she offers; she knows I reach for it with one hand while a gun is trained at my head with the other.

And I want it.

I want the venom so bad that a new kind of hurt envelops.

“They don’t hear you; they don’t feel you,” she spews. “So why feel at all? Why live with nothing to hold onto?”

Just like a swinging medallion, she hypnotizes me into trusting her lies. She empties the red hourglass into a pill bottle and offers it to me. She even takes some, just to prove to me that it’s safe and there’s nothing to fear. There’s nothing to fear, she says with her six eyes. There’s nothing to fear at all.

And when I see it, the webs that held me to my bed snap from my arms and give me the choice to take what is rightfully mine. The widow sneers. The thing I long for most is only inches from my face.

So what prevents me from taking it?

All this time, she’s been the answer.

Death.

Life will always go on; I will only be a phase. But with Death, I am something more, on the other side. New adventures await in the unknown, things yet undiscovered. And if I take the pills, the widow will show me the way of the red hourglass, guiding me in the direction of a better skyline.

Right?

My skin quivers at the thought of being like her, an equal to a hand of death. An angel or a demon. It is up for me to decide. I’m the giver of my own life; I can take it if I want.

And on the other side, I am unmatched.

The widow undoes the lid to the bottle and pours me a dose of tablets. Blue, like sapphires and seas and trust, and I know that this will be right. There’s nothing to fear.

There’s nothing to fear at all.

“Take them. Take them,” she tells me. “You will be like me.”

And like Eve to the tree, I take the pills.

Raising my glass to our good fortune, for a brighter future, for the both of us in zeal-induced euphoria, I toast, “Here’s to us: Soon to be equals in a place where two have died at their own hands. We will be the kings and queens of our destinies, and this is only the debut of our divine illustriousness.”

But in the epicenter of my pledge, a nagging sense of fright arrests me. What am I doing? I’m paralyzed. I can’t believe I’m doing this. This isn’t me. I’m not the one who does this.

What have I done to myself?

Who is killing me?

And the poison wears off like a drink, and I can feel the frost now, covering me in the cold reality of my actions, but the influence speaks on. “We leave behind all regrets. We forget those who have been true to us.”

No, this is wrong! I think.

“We will depart from this world as victors of a destiny hard-fought.”

No.

“Our fates are sealed.”

No!

“We drink to our chosen paths.”

NO!

And just like that, the pills are gone, the hourglass spent, and the widow disappears, leaving me gasping, coughing, choking, dying on the floor, clawing at the venom in my throat. The world spins and coils around me like the webs that held me back while Death watches from above, the lone onlooker of her next victim. Her smile is as brittle as it is cold, and it crackles as it grows wider.

“I am the only victor,” she declares in the watches of the night. “I am always the victor.”

“No!” I cry. “I can’t die! Not now! You can’t be the victor!”

“Oh, but I am. And you are yet another victim of my venom.”

“Just like the others,” she lulls. “Just like the others.”

And just like the others, my eyes fail me and my heart arrests, and this is death that I taste. It’s over for me. I have become my own murderer; I took something that wasn’t even mine, and I didn’t even know it. I let myself become poisoned, I gave myself in to Death and her webs and her red hourglass, where I gambled my most prized possession for a moment’s worth of ecstasy.

But now it’s over.

Now reality has a say and Death reveals herself as the widow she truly is, another nightcrawler come to rob my survival.

The red hourglass.

The webs that keep me alive.

The lies.

And that is how I dreamed in the watches of the night: of horror and the restraining belief that I was sovereign; of the widow not to be trusted; of a starless night in bitter isolation, where I crowned myself ruler of this destiny, the one I have no control over. It was a dream. It is always only a dream.

Until it’s too late.

Until it’s a nightmare.