I
The world disappears when I fall asleep. All of it, except maybe the silence of outer space. Hands in front of my face, a simple blink, staring into darkness? The world still goes on. Once I shut my eyelids down and my mind eases into dreamland, I’m the last entity in existence. (Well, as far as I know. All I have left is my sense of self, however tenuous it is, though I suppose I could be missing stars and galaxies floating around me unseen.)
I’ve blinked the world in and out since I was born. My mothers say I never slept through the night as a baby, that I screamed every few seconds the first few weeks of my life. That tracks with what I know about the state: I wake at almost the last moment I was conscious, give or take a few microseconds or so. That’s why I’m so sure it’s not just a persistent dream, regardless of what my parents know should be logical and absolute. I tried to tell them once, but they thought I was just afraid of the dark, and as the confession wore on, they believed I was having vivid nightmares or even sleep paralysis. I’d like to blame my ten-year-old self’s communication skills, but I doubt it would’ve gone any other way.
They sent me to a therapist, like any sensible and empathetic parents would. Dr. Nakahara treated and tested for all the logical illnesses she could think of with no luck, but she became a godsend in the long run. After several years, I trusted her enough to know the truth. She doesn’t believe me—only one person ever has (and I scared them off anyway)—but she refuses to judge me or my theory. She always starts our sessions asking how I’ve been sleeping, and I flicker with pride each time I can report consecutive hours, or what feels like consecutive hours when I’m just alone in the void, at least. Regardless, the bags under my eyes are permanent stains, and I’ve resigned myself to perpetual exhaustion. It’s not so bad, once you get used to the wobbly gait and lightheadedness.
One day, the inevitable happens and I collapse outside my townhouse. I quickly return the world in a panic, a ring of strangers and estranged neighbors surrounding me, entertaining me with polite smiles and nods. The rest fail to disguise their rubbernecking as sincere concern. The kindest stranger finishes rolling me on to my side as I awaken, garbling my words more than usual.
Something had been in that other place with me.
I thank the man for helping me and hurry inside. I rush to my bedroom and lock myself in, curling into a ball in the corner of my closet as I try to calm down, try to convince myself I only imagined it.
My mind is finally collapsing in on itself, and I will surely die soon, my hysteria lands on. And after that, so will everything else…
“Will you try? I will be right here when you wake up, I promise.”
The one person who believed me always made me lie down with them when they came over. They threaded their burningly cold fingers through my hair and hummed to me until I relaxed. I always tried, with them. (What did I do to make them renege on their promise?) I wish they were here again now.
I spend the entire night alternating between daring myself to close my eyes again and scaring myself out of the idea. My trembling gets so bad I make myself sick, but I don’t move. The puddle’s sour smell and gross heat keeps me grounded enough that I’m finally calm when the morning birds start singing, proof the world is still there, if a bit more distant through the exhaustion than usual.
The next day goes on plainly. I clean up, go to my job, and then to my appointment.
“Have you been able to sleep?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
And we talk about anything else. Dr. Nakahara tells me her oldest son just married a wonderful man, and they’re moving to his home in France. He’s healthy, she’s proud of him, and he’ll live a long time, I suppose. As long as I don’t fall asleep for too long, as I still don’t know if my time in that void could permanently damage this place. I grit my teeth before accidentally saying that out loud. She notices the twitch, however.
“I know we’ve been managing this condition of yours for a while, but I wanted to try one more treatment. Now, hear me out, but I think hypnotherapy may help you, at the very least, be able to enter a state of mind where you’re better able to fall asleep and stay asleep. Will you try it?”
It takes a few weeks to arrange, but finally I head to the sleep center where Dr. Nakahara and the hypnotist settle me into the thin, crinkly hospital bed and scratchy, bleach-white sheets. When all of us finally sit down and breathe each other’s air in the stuffy room and the nurse finishes scouring my scalp with alcohol and paste for the EEG nodes and the sleep techs kick on the machines, the hypnotist flips on an image of revolving fractals.
“Focus on the image,” he says in a low, purposefully soothing voice. I consider resisting on principle, but then I hear another voice trickle back in.
“Will you try? For me?”
I settle back, imagining the node gunk to be their cold fingertips cradling my head, and although I don’t completely tune him out, I barely hear the hypnotist after a while. My vision goes fuzzy, and I let myself drift into that liminal space between consciousness and sleep.
“All right… Very good…” The hypnotist’s voice speaks first and forms words microseconds after. I’m only just able to follow. “Close your eyes and start to breathe in through your nose… Try to… any tension in your body…”
“Please try.”
The world falls away before I even register shutting my eyes.
The best way I can describe this other place is that it’s like the muffled sounds underwater, but with droning silence ringing clear. This, all flatly running through my body. My mouth can open, but no sound comes out, and I more know my mouth opens than feel my jaw hinging. I’ve tried opening my eyes before, but that only causes me to wake up. I consider ending my stay immediately just because I know it won’t matter how long I’m here, I won’t get any real measure of sleep. Not to mention, that old, familiar tickle of anxiety creeps at the back of my head, worried that if I stay too long, I won’t be able to restore my home at all.
Then, there’s a sound, a flutter, a cascade. I know before it gets too close that the other entity is here again. It—they (so many, yet all together) swirl and flatten themself in front of and around me. They’re cold, cold enough to burn. I try to gasp, but my chest is still too heavy and paralyzed. They land, hover, linger simultaneously at my every angle, brushing at me in timid bursts. The cold inches even closer until two, soft, freezing points caress my eyelids. Make them so raw I nearly open them just to stop everything. Then there’s a sigh. A desperate, hesitant giggle. I know that sound, just as I remember those ever-cold hands trying to rock me to peaceful slumber. That friend (sadly gone before they were anything else) who used to question me, and, after they quickly got bored, would make up their own theories about it.
“Maybe it is just a matter of knowing where one thing ends and another joins,” they’d said once, in their scattered way.
They never stopped moving, even when wilted in depression. I don’t think they could pause without combusting on the spot. I’d given a small chuckle at their input, though, and gone back to explaining simple things like “microseconds” to them. And “love.” They were intrigued with that one. Maybe it was wishful thinking (imagination), but it seemed they said it to me at least twice whenever they came around, letting it roll off their tongue like it was the last sound on Earth.
Is this what happened to them? Did I bring them here?
My heart ignores these questions, but not in a resigned way. For once, I find myself caught up in whatever moment this happens to be. They giggle again, more subdued.
Their touch moves from my eyelids and encircles me in a cozy and grounding grip. More cold presses along my body, enough that I can sketch their form in my mind. A few moments later, I make out whispers of “We are not alone,” and “We are found,” and “I am here, my friend, my love,” repeated over and over again. Their grip tightens, drawing out a long-denied sigh from me. Hot tears form at the corners of my eyes. I force myself to know my own arms again and hold them as close as I can without dissolving into them.
We stay like this for what feels like ten thousand years. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s ten minutes or ten million millennia. I’ve never been able to parse time here, where nothing has been until now, but I forget to care and fear. For however long we embrace, I’m the most at peace I’ve ever been. Restored in some ways I thought impossible.
They keep saying, “We found you. I am sorry. I am here, I promise,” the whole time until they shudder. “We must go…”
I consider never opening my eyes again, to fling myself into this abyss and never fear myself another day. But I remember Dr. Nakahara, her son and his husband, my mothers. My friend (my love?) is right, and we part. We’ll meet again; there’s no way we can leave it at this. A final, gentle sting of cold trails from my temple to my chin before disappearing. I open my eyes.
I don’t even mind the long bout of consciousness hopscotch my doctors and I play over the next hour and half this time. I don’t fully fall asleep again, but I manage to doze back to the cusp a few times, almost feeling their fingers brush over me. By the end of the session, both the hypnotist and Dr. Nakahara look apologetically at me, trying to hide their frowns in thoughtfully pursed lips.
“I’m sorry,” she says as she guides me to my car. “I knew it was a long shot, but I thought we could give something more out-of-the-box a try. I promise we’ll stick to pure management in the future—”
I pull her into a tight embrace.
“It’s all right,” I say. I even believe myself. When I let go, she has an odd look on her face, but that may be because I have one on mine. (Has she ever seen me smile genuinely before?) We confirm the next few weeks of appointments, and I head home where I eat, climb the stairs to my room, and lay down, that same smile still resting in its spot. I can make it through this night, even if I’ll technically never miss a moment of it. For them, I’ll try.
I let my eyelids fall.
Their beautiful, cold embrace returns almost instantly, lighting me on fire from head to toe. And mere moments after comes the delicate touch of their icy kiss on my lips.
II
For the fourth night in a row at the exact same time, the familiar stars peek through the gap in the makeshift curtains. No one should be awake at this time. Humans need rest to recuperate. However, unlike the previous nights of staying in bed and trying to decipher the stars’ sprawling language, I get up.
Boxes litter the bedroom floor, ready to trap and trip. It has been a year and a half, but the hollow items in meaningless containers remain stuck. Stuffed. Meant to be many and scattering. I shake the urgent déjà vu loose, though it refills. At some point, this house was supposed to be a home, but the pans and rollers and stud finder and toolkit sit abandoned in another room. The one meant to be an office. Library. Sewing room.
Things happen. Plans change. Life just gets in the way.
The backyard stretches before me, far more brightly lit than it should be. Skinny pines sway in and out of their own shadows, which lean away from the hissing, incandescent floodlights. Under the cover of the trees, late-night fireflies blink here, then gone, there, and gone again. Like a friend from so long ago, but so recent. Someone I knew so well until I did not. Microseconds pass between watching a firefly drift up and up and losing its form among the distant black.
We are ready, I think. But for what?
I do know, but in that way humans know an actor’s face yet struggle to place it. My mind whirls, then pauses on my last and only friend. So far away. So unimaginably close. We had not meant to lose track.
The sky consumes. When the stars once again creep from the vastness, they are teeth scraping against my vision. A breath. Another. One more. The sky rushes down to meet where I stand, surrounding and lifting me back—back?—back into the fold. Even as the sky looms all around, the stars are so small, distant, lonely. I reach to comfort the faintest one, to feel something, make boxing ourselves in for so long worth it.
It is cold. Far colder than my own internal temperature. It burns me it is so cold.
The stars come alive and swarm. Our flashing fires burn, contained gasses hiss, great masses dent and warp. I cannot differentiate our own limbs anymore from the snaking radiation spreading farther and farther away from ourselves until “we” cannot see “I” anymore.
Oh, we realize, this is what we had forgotten.
We were always meant to inherit the skies, but something drew us down to a glittering planet. In panic, we seek something out there, right here, scramble away from what once could keep us together, grounded, “I.” What had it been, what had distracted us?
The life! No, that was not it, not entirely.
The inhabitants! Closer, closer.
A friend.
We stop for a moment, one inscrutable by those humans’ eyes. Those lovely organs so determined to process particles that they stay awake far too long for a chance of a chance to catch chaos in the act. We gave ourselves those eyes for years, tethered them to proper brain stem passageways, created miles of nerve deltas that wound through the muscle and sinew bound by curious flesh. Boxed ourselves in for too long, and for what?
The “I” knows, remembers, and suddenly the “we” knows why we stuffed ourselves into containers of containers. It happened only recently, feels like a half-remembered fantasy the “we” are content to let fizzle out, but the “I” fights literal tooth and nail to maintain. Faces and eyes are meaningless to “we.” We have experienced thousands of species, epochs of years, bushels of glittering planets. “I” does not think it is so devoid of meaning, especially when I saw the humans’ ability to squash time into certain phrases, keeping it captive generation after generation so that those eyes, those faces, those fanciful creatures have the ability to teach and disperse phrases like “fanciful creatures” to each other.
The “we” fights back to a scatter, even as we stop another, less inscrutable moment. Their eyes. Never closing until it became too much. Their face. Twisting and warping—the word is “smiling”—as they taught us to capture time in impossible scraps called “microseconds” with tired amusement, and then explained “amusement” as we, being I at that microsecond of time, ran my fingers through their hair to try and soothe them during the night.
They are lovely. They do not sleep. They can only pause.
“I’ve got a condition…”
We knew, we knew, but I asked them to explain anyway. As soon as they fall asleep, everything pauses. Their word is “disappears.” This human—“friend” is the word… and “love” is another word—always watched us, reached for me, told us that I was the only one they had ever told this secret who had believed them. At that point, “we” had become entrenched in “I” and I had a human name and the vague ability to process time into tight consecutive bits. I had descended from the vastness and lived. It was little more than a meager life, by all human definitions, yet so full and fast that I had forgotten “I” had been “we” not too long before.
But things happened. Plans changed. Life just got in the way.
Life pauses now.
We feel the pause and wonder if we are sensitive to them after so long so close. We draw closer, arms of radiation opening until they close over my love, my friend. They are exhausted, as always, and if conversations with them still hold true, they are afraid. Itchy. To them, life is not supposed to pause. Time goes from one tangible point to the next in rigid order. “Pause” is a metaphor, and is, paradoxically, another spell to corral time.
“We are here,” we rush to call. They shiver, and everything un-pauses.
Did they not recognize us? Should we have congealed into “I” again? At that disaster of a thought, I wish I had chosen to stay in that lonely house with no plans, direction, history. At least time could be forced into order. Puzzles could be solved. I understand fear, as itchy as it is. I could eschew the skies, cold fire, reaching arms. Box myself back into blood and keratin. Go back to them. Apologize for forgetting or being distracted, whichever they understand best.
Once, they showed me a story where a unicorn went off on a journey and became the first of her kind to regret. We almost remembered ourselves in that itchy instant. That may have been the start of things happening, plans changing, life getting in the way, as I made excuses to leave not long after. Or maybe “we” had manifested too much and prevented “I” from settling down as humans can.
We halt for as long as time must be restrained to become a halt. We are not supposed to. Star stuff must always spread, always find room to thin out. “We” are much at the moment: fast, bright, effervescent. But “I” will harden us into nothing until the next—
Pause.
They return, just as scared and human as ever, but we restrain no more time. We regain the concept of fingers as they should know them, brushing cold their way so they know we are here.
Words… Humans respond to words.
“We are not alone,” we say, suddenly understanding the empty gravity of those last two syllables. “We are found. I am here, my love, my friend.”
We repeat those phrases as many times as we and they need to hear, releasing time into the void that originated it and letting the microseconds merge into each other. We, ourselves, understand the length we stay there, surrounding them, brushing frost over their solid body in the hopes they understand that we meant no harm, I just did not understand at the time. We barely understand now, but far more things make sense now that “I” and “we” have made amends.
“We must go…”
The cosmos calls. I am too tightly wound and must surrender to ourselves before a reaction happens too soon. I itch at the thought of leaving them as soon as I have found them again and apologized. But chaos must scatter. Time hates being kept for too long, and I never learned the stronger words and phrases to bind it to my will.
My love hesitates, and then leaves willingly as the “I” makes another promise—one we intend to help uphold. In the meantime, we take off across the galaxies and back innumerable times, gathering more stars to the swarm and pushing at the boundaries of the universe.
We anticipate the next pause microseconds before it happens, and we make our way back to that point. We indulge in I once more, and my friend, my love, they welcome my embrace as much as I yearn for theirs, feelings unchanged. As I hold them close, I remember one more word they taught me, though it is best understood as an action. Leaning down, I continue chanting that neither of us are alone in the vastness anymore. Time crumples into an easily held pinpoint as I kiss them.