Memories in bottles

Do you remember what it felt like when she read to you? How soft her voice as she ran her hands through your hair? In those small moments, your blood burned in adoration. You wanted to curl up there on her lap and stay in the spaces between waking forever. Nothing since then has felt worthwhile.

Everything tastes so bland. Everything sounds so dull. Everything feels so empty.

But there are moments when you sleep where things never changed.
Where she still writes you poetry and reads you to sleep and smiles her small smiles.

It is in these moments you find solace. You curl up in them and let a wistful tide pull at you. It drags you further into its depths. Little memories lap at your shores bringing with them lost treasures. A whisper in a bottle. Soon your beaches are glittering with glass and you spend your eternal days picking through them, oblivious to the little cuts the sea glass leaves you.

Eventually, you are awash in it. Wading through nebulous imagery, cherishing the pieced together fragments of her smile, her eyes, the feel of her hands. You are swimming out further and further. Drinking in the scenes your drunken mind conjures. Further and further.

And then you stop, look around. Reality beckons as light peers through shuttered blinds. You cannot find your shore. You have swum too far out. Immersed yourself in so many dreams, they are now indistinguishable from the memories that bore them. In panic, you gasp for air. You yearn for something familiar to latch on to. To keep you afloat so that you might drift back to consciousness. But all the pieces are splintered far too small to support. And the current is getting stronger. Tugging. Pulling. Yearning. Screaming. Everything is spinning, warping, twisting. Nothing is right. There is so much of it, the salt stings your eyes. You can no longer hold yourself above it all and then it has you. You lungs scream protest and the dark world about you grows cold.

This is how you wake. Clinging to fragments of dream that slip from your desperate grasp. Every night you drown yourself in her and every morning you wake feeling dead.