In six months, Gwen Johnston turns thirty, and when she does, she vows she'll have her life together. She'll no longer be jumping from one job to another, from one relationship to the next. A new, more mature, Gwen will have emerged. She's giving he...
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She's ahead of me, running toward the fire, her brown ponytail swishing, and I'm trying to catch her. I can never catch her. My heart pounds in my ears, in time with my feet. I yell for her to stop, but she doesn't acknowledge me.
In the next instant, the roar is deafening, rips right through me as though I'm made of nothing, and my feet lift, leave the ground. I'm flying. Back. Back. As though a superhero has put his hand in the middle of my chest and tossed me across a room. The force is brutal, steals my breath, stops my heart.
When I hit the earth, it feels like all my body parts are detached. A marionette with the strings snipped. My ears are ringing, ringing, ringing, and there's distant shouting filtered through mud. I blink up at the cloudless sky and the plumes of smoke starting to overtake the blue. My head falls to the side, and she's there, just out of reach.
"Gwen," I mouth, but no sound comes out.
She's not moving, and that's not right. She's always moving—dancing, singing, doodling, cooking—in perpetual motion. Unstoppable. A force equal to the one that just lifted me off my feet.
"Gwen," I try again.
Her head flops in my direction, but it's not Gwen. It's not Gwen at all.
~ * ~
I wake with a start, drenched in sweat, clutching my chest. My heart is still racing, and I'm momentarily disoriented. It takes a moment for me to realize that we're in our latest hotel, the half-light of the pending sunrise peeking at the edge of the horizon through the open curtains.
Right. Halifax.
I swing my legs over the edge of the bed, and I rub my face, trying to get myself under control. The nightmares are back, worse than they've been in years. Before Gwen and I started sleeping together, I'd had one or two in the months we'd been traveling together. Manageable. Expected, really. Trauma hibernates in me, occasionally stirring to remind me it's there.
But this? Every night I'm dreaming of something terrible happening to Gwen, sometimes multiple horrific endings. I wake from one only to drift into another.
What the fuck is wrong with me? I'm going to return to the field more exhausted than I was when I left. Before I gave into this feeling with Gwen, I was doing better, almost normal, or at least what I perceived as normal.
Whatever is happening to me now, there's nothing normal about it. My trauma isn't hibernating; it's roaring to life.
Once I think I'm feeling up to it, I glance over my shoulder at Gwen. She's still in the bed beside me, her breathing deep and even. Sleep is the only thing she does with total commitment—like the dead, and I wonder if being in the same bed is half the problem. Seeing her so lifeless, given how exuberant she normally is, has flipped a switch in my brain that I didn't even realize was there.
