I want to walk with you in my dreams, but I’m afraid you wouldn’t remember me there.

When I go there, I am in the form of someone else; someone like me, but unlike me all the same, in terrifying and unknowable ways. My life there is simple; it moves in a rhythmic motion. Not a worry burdens my shoulders, and I wander to mundane but unknown places, adventuring a suburbia of the mind.

The theme park is there, with the same name it’s always had. Yet it’s nothing I’ve ever seen before and it’s nothing anyone else will ever see.

The schools aren’t wholly unfamiliar to me, but I’ve never stepped foot in a single one of them.

The country roads wind, and I ride them straight out from a suburban home.

Sometimes I’ll find a small crossroad city. It’ll be the middle of the night, when the air is cool and fresh and I feel like I once did as a child, waiting patiently, and listening as the night told me what to do.

I pause and breathe in the freshness in their air. It is new to me, a feeling I haven’t known for a long time.

I am not as alive awake as I am in my dreams. You are the one tether I have, the bond with which to keep myself connected to this world. Without you, I may slip and fall into another world.

I am inside myself now. Nothing I want to feel or do makes its way through. Even you, who holds in their hands the largest extension of my heart, do not know the extent of what stays there. It may be no one will ever know what I want our waking world to find.

It’s been only months since I met you, and everyone else I can see, stationed as I am above, from my ever-fraying tightrope. It is the only view which may bring substance to a murky, liquid existence. It is not enough and can never be.

The me that lives there fell in love with life. The me that lives there knows the world at its most peaceful. The me that lives there can see the path in front of them and they may walk it. The me that-

No, you wouldn’t remember me.

No one remembers me.

I’ve forgotten you already.