Spite

Sleep won’t keep me from you. I may only see you as an afterimage in the back of my mind, but I refuse to allow these dreams to slip back into its darkness as if they were only a mirage of what may have been a memory. I won’t set you free so easily. 

You taunt me, still; six years have passed but I cannot hear the sound of my own name without remembering how you sung it coyly, a staccato at each syllable. That may be why I truncated it, cut off the dead weight that reminded me of you.  

So when you wander through my dreams, don’t assume you’re traveling familiar terrain. I will see to it that you stumble over the slits in my subconscious. I’ll gauge them in myself just to make you eat dirt.

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