Inception

I really wish I wasn't at home right now writing this, but sometimes I get sucked into this world so deep, I forget to surface, before I remember I'm suppose to breath.

So there it was, open air, modern market place. Maybe a mall. Maybe sub EurAsia.

Shes alone. She's practically skipping across the tiled halls. The women are laughing. The children are smiling. Everyone is shopping.

Then the gun blasts begin. Bullets flying past their faces, destroying cases of glass and finery.

She's moving again, sucked into the store front from which the army of madness is marching forth.

Big men, big guns, even bigger boots. She gauges the value of her life in the current situation and seeks shelter. Peddling her heels as fast as she can, she can't seem to find enough room under the cash register to hide all of herself from the destroyers. Surely he will see her as she can see him running by now and he will look at her feet and without a moments deliberation he will shoot and kill the woman he once knew, who loved him.

Instead...

YANK! at that moment my head is lifted out of the memory, my face removed from the pillow, as if some angel of mercy is pulling pulling puuuuling me by the hair at the back of my head, back up from the malignant darkness to the surface so I can breath again.

Breath. Breath. Gasppantchoke Breath!

That wasn't a dream. That was a nightmare. Her first. That wasn't a dream. It was a memory. Someone else's. His.

The experience was so real she lies awake in the dark transfixed by her own altered state, listening to her own breathing to reestablish normal boundaries, so grateful to not be there anymore, in that place, in that moment, watching those men do those things, hearing the women's screams.

PTSD like symptoms set in immediately and she knows they will pass quickly like the nightmare, and maybe only last til dawn. It's happened before. Sometimes her body just does that, it mimics the mood around here. It's not the first time shes experienced another's memory but it's by far the worst one so far. "No more!" She cries into the darkness "It's over" Thats what you get little bitch for when you say the pen is mightier than the sword.

In the middle of the nightmare memory morning her lover returns. Her lips struggle to submit and she whimpers "Daddy" just before she crushes herself into his embrace. "There there" he says with a reinforced smile. Pat pat on her head. Smile. Tears begin to fall.

He knows it's not her fault. She was born this way. A seer. A seeker. A mind like an antenna. So he knows that she knows it was real. And so it is. And as the tremors die down and the other's memory of a time and place she never experienced until tonight, slowly slips from her subconscious physiology back to the secret bunker were demons of destruction and death are stored, he begins to stroke, stroke, stroke the soft back of her neck whispering sweet words of love.

She produces a tiny purr, and he slips inside her. For the first time, ever, she doesn't come. She doesn't want to. She's not herself tonight. Another borrowed her soul and tried to subdue her spirit. So tonight, just fucking and fucking being alive is enough.

And with each graduated rhythmic thrust, she resist the urge to recoil and reminds herself of the fact that she still believes what she said was true. And she still believes the pen is mightier than the sword and she still believes. She still believes. She still believes. He comes. Rest.