Not Again

I woke up on my back in a field.

Not slowly. Somehow in a way you wake up from a normal sleep where the room comes back to you in pieces. This was instant, like a light switching on, and the first thing I understood was that something was wrong before I even understood what I was looking at.

Grass. Sky. No ceiling.

I sat up too fast and the world tilted. I pressed my hands into the ground. Cold, real, dirt and grass. I slapped my face. Pain. I did it again, harder. Still the same sky. Still the same field stretching in every direction, tall grass moving in a wind I could barely feel.

"Wake up,"

I said. My voice sounded small and wrong in all that open air.

"Wake up. Wake up. Wake up."

I dug my nails into my forearm until I felt it. Nothing changed. The sky stayed the same pale blue. The grass kept moving.

I stood up and turned in a full circle. Fields in every direction. A dark line of forest at the edge. A mountain in the distance with white peaks. No roads. No buildings. No sound of traffic or voices or anything that belonged to the world I knew.

My brain kept trying to explain it. I had fallen asleep on the way home. I was still asleep. I had hit my head somehow. There was a rational thing that had happened and I just had not found it yet.

I ran. Not toward anything specific. I just ran because standing still felt like accepting it and I was not going to accept it. The grass whipped at my legs. My breath came fast and ragged. The mountain did not get closer. The treeline did not shift. I ran until my lungs gave out and I stopped with my hands on my knees, bent over, gasping.

When I straightened up the field was exactly the same as before.

That was when it hit me.

It was not fear. Fear was something I know. Fear is something you brace against and wait out. This was different. This was everything I had spent the last few months building, every small careful thing, every moment I had let myself believe something was getting better, and it was gone. I was gone from it.

The notebook on my desk. Tomorrow I will tell her. I had written that last night.

Last night.

My legs went.

I did not sit down so much as stop holding myself up. My knees hit the ground and I just stayed there in the grass and the whole thing came apart at once. 

I cried in a way I had not let myself cry since I was a kid on the kitchen floor waiting for the feeling to pass. The kind that takes over your whole chest, that makes breathing difficult, that you cannot perform or manage or cut short because it is bigger than that. I did not try to stop it. There was no point.

"Why now,"

I said, when I could make words.

"Why now. Why now."

I kept saying it. Not as a question after a while. Just something to say.

I hit the ground with my fist. Then again. The grass gave uselessly under it and I hit it again anyway. I wanted something to push back. There was nothing.

I thought about Aki at the park the day before. Her hand on the blanket close to mine. The way she had looked at me all afternoon like she was not embarrassed to. I thought about writing that one line in my notebook and actually meaning it and actually believing that tomorrow was going to happen.

I had been so careful. I had not let myself want things for so long and then I had started to, slowly, in small amounts, and I had thought, I genuinely thought, that maybe this time the ground under it was solid.

"It is never real,"

I said to the field.

"Every time something is real it gets taken away from me. Every single time."

I screamed it the second time. Into the open air with nobody to hear it, no walls to absorb it, just the sound going out and dissolving.

"I was going to tell her. I was actually going to tell her."

My voice broke on the last word and I stopped trying to use it.

I sat in the grass with my face in my hands and breathed in the uneven way you breathe when something has used up all the air in you. The wind moved the grass around me. The mountain sat on the horizon looking exactly the same as before.

I do not know how long I stayed like that.

Long enough that the position started to hurt. Long enough that the crying had gone through its worst and come out the other side into something flatter and emptier. Not better. Just done.

I lifted my head.

My hands were shaking. My throat hurt. My face was wet and cold in the wind.

The field was still there.

I laughed. A short, wrecked sound that was not really a laugh. I laughed because I did not know what else to do with it. Years of keeping myself together, years of being the kind of person who does not fall apart, who keeps walking, who learns the pattern and adapts and survives. And here I was kneeling in a field in nowhere with grass stains on my knees, destroyed by something I did not even understand yet.

My father would have laughed at me.

That thought came in and I let it sit there for a second and then I pushed it back out.

"He does not deserve to be here,"

I said quietly.

The anger arrived properly after the crying was done, which is usually how it goes for me. Its never hot and loud, more like a slow hard thing settling into my chest.

I was so close. That was the part that made it worse. Not just that this had happened, but the timing of it. The day after the park. The night after I wrote that line. Like whatever this was had waited specifically for the moment I was most convinced that things could be good before pulling it away.

I knew that was not rational. I knew the world does not work like that, does not pick its moments to hurt people deliberately. I knew that.

It did not help.

"Fine,"

I said to nothing.

"Fine. You want to break me, this is what you have to work with. Go ahead."

The field did not respond. The mountain did not respond. The grass moved.

I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum where the pressure was still sitting and breathed slowly until it became manageable.

The hunger arrived a while later, which was almost a relief. Hunger was concrete. Hunger had a solution. I had not eaten since the afternoon before and my hands had started to feel slightly disconnected from my arms in a way they do when my blood sugar drops.

I reached into my pocket. The receipt from Daiki's sweets was still there. I stared at it for longer than it made sense. Then I folded it carefully and put it back.

I started walking toward the trees because the mountain was too far and the field went nowhere. The grass thinned at the edges. The forest started. These trees were not right, too smooth, the bark like stone in places, the branches at angles that did not look like the trees I knew. I walked between them and the light dropped and the air went cooler and I kept moving because stopping felt like the beginning of something I did not want to start.

I found fruit about forty minutes in. Round, dark red, plum-sized. I looked at it for a while.

"I don't care,"

I said.

I ate one. Tangy, slightly bitter, not good exactly but edible. I ate three more before I made myself stop.

The hunger dulled slightly. My hands stopped feeling disconnected. That was the only thing that changed. I leaned against the tree and looked up through the canopy at a sky that was starting to go gold at the edges.

Somewhere right now Aki was probably sending a message I would not answer.

I pressed my forehead against the bark of the tree and stayed like that for a while.