where do you put your nightmares?

I wake with my dreams. There’s no reason to leave them behind. Me and the woman with the high-pitched screams and the man with fleas and the giant, growing ever larger, fumble into coherence hand in hand, sleep passing out of us, ears now perked to mundane sounds: the radiator, those very same morning birds- or so you imagine- someone in the shower.

Sadly, only I’ll survive this brighter world. My friends, or demons, only waste away. My mind will harbor what is left, will try to reconnect with them in consciousness, but they shouldn’t have handed me their fate like that. My lunch plans erase them from existence.

It’s possible they’ll flicker through my purview when I gaze into the mirror or when I let the clicking of the keyboard saturate the air around me until I’m back in the thick of my brain with them and the air is sweating, too close to breathe, and I’m gasping for real air, sane faces, and one more opportunity to live in normalcy with the rest of the world, instead of stuck inside my mind where the gallows are, where men with rumpled-up faces make no apologies for stealing your lucidity.