// steel blue air //

He always remembers his dreams when he wakes. For a split-second, he's not here, not anywhere, caught between worlds, everything and nothing all at once. He keeps his eyes closed for all long as he can, holding onto the fragments in his head, elusive as gossamer and just as fragile.

There are nights he dreams of pyramids and white-winged horses, dragons with rippling scales colored scarlet and gold. Castles with towers that stretch toward the sky, crouching dark and stony and secret on the edge of his sanity. He can fly in these dreams, soar above the ground as effortlessly as breathing, nothing under his feet and steel blue air against his face.

He dreams that he's flying above the house he used to live in another lifetime ago- a sprawling mansion barely clinging to the side of a hill in a town where everyone seemed to know his business, even if he'd never met them. Now he barely knows himself, the face of a stranger staring back at him from deep within a smeared mirror-glass.

"Tell us what you dream," they say, one of them holding his face, tilting his jaw, forcing him to meet the eyes of nobody he recognizes. Sometimes what he sees scares him so much he screams until his chest aches, and every breath of air he sucks in is filled with tiny silver blades that slice his throat, leave it red-raw and bleeding. He coils into himself and the fingers strengthen their grip, curled into bone and it hurts. It hurts but he still won't speak, won't tell them what he sees in his head because it's all he has.

"If you'd just tell us," they say, "if you'd just tell us what's in your head, we could help you, JC. If you'd just tell us what you dream."

"No," he whispers, "no. I won't." Drawn up tight and small, so small, letting his eyes slip closed, shutting in the pictures that are his and his alone. He strokes long, elegant fingers over pale lids, the flutterblink touch of his lashes like a thousand tiny butterfly wings.

"No change," he hears someone say from another world away, the staccato taptaptap of pen against clipboard marking him as uncooperative. He knows it without looking, can hear it in their voices, smell it on their skin.

These are the days he feels the familiar dull jab of the needle into his arm, a slow burn slipping under his skin and holding him tight until his world slides and stretches, blurs and shimmers at the edges. Colors bleed into each other, red becomes blue becomes yellow becomes orange and he can run faster than the speed of light, can shoot lightning from his fingertips, can speak the ancient language of the gods. These are the days he can do all of that and so much more, if only they'd listen to him, really listen to him. Because now he can talk, can tell them all they want to know, if only they knew how to hear him. He tries to tell them and the words just won't come -they're stuck somewhere inside him, floating and swirling amongst the chemicals in his blood. White on black on red, names and dates and times and so much he wants to say with a tongue that's thick and sluggish and traitorous. On the days the words won't let themselves be spoken, he gives voice to them in song instead.

He stretches out his arms and spins round and round, head tilted toward the sky. "If you want to fly," he breathes softly, over and over, watching the way his words spiral and swirl then flutter down to the ground, "if you want to fly." Over and over, and round and round and round he spins, until the ground beneath him buckles and tilts and wavers and he can almost make believe he's flying.

it gets so damn dark down here // sometimes I want that steel blue air

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