FEVER DREAM/TILTED FRIENDS IN DAYLIGHT

Some kind of a fever dream. Not with slick cliche sweats, nor common moans and odd murmurs, those words in our sleep that reveal our dark hearts. Perhaps not a dream at all, but the dream of a dream, the memory of something too harsh for daylight. Some sort of a nightmare that thrilled as it frightened, made me sit up and cry out with a shriek that was akin to the wail that that one makes at an orgasm's last gasp. Awake, shuddering, unsure if my tremors were welcome or sordid. Wondering if I had been asleep at all, or merely dwelling within a dormant section of self that embraced the night's dark. Leaning back down, head on the pillow, neck craned to the right as I struggled to watch the sun as it started to slant its rays through my room. Shadow and gold, tilted friends in daylight.

Within less than a minute, this fever had passed, had just faded away like the impression of hands on sunburned purple skin. Flesh so used up by the light that its tone was the tint of the juiciest grape, a colour that belonged on the side of a can with the word 'Welch's' writ large, its logo so fierce.

As for me, I could all too easily drink from a glass with a liquid that dark, masochist that I am, but no one outside of my self was allowed to stroke my own skin with that similar shade. Something repulses, when a skin the same colour as those old 'flesh-tone' crayons slowly descends into pink and then red before landing at last in this lavender offshoot.

I once wore such a strange natural coat that masked my true skin, my young body, betrayed. Throw in some sweet sun and the ocean's swift dives and five hours later, a slow melt had begun. My skin like pure lava, hot to the touch.

I remembered that day as I lay in that bed, my fever dream slowly fading, that day by the beach, that same night when the shower's harsh pulse stabbed small knives in my flesh. I felt them as blades, those piercing soft streams. I almost screamed in the shower -- what a horror film cliche! The agony, after some days of stiff-moving propulsion, eventually left, and my skin's light drab colour reluctantly returned, and that week of pure pain soon faded away. Never gone, only stuck back in that gap in our brain where our most agonizing thoughts tend to bury themselves. (Though they always dig themselves out and rise up through the earth.)

Was my skin purple now? No, not a bit. It looked almost fresh, healthy and young. I had the urge to kiss my own wrist to taste my own self. Surely this was a hint that my fever dream (if it had even been such a beast!) had now dissipated, its forgotten small moments now merging and morphing with the dust motes lit by the sun that shot through my window and claimed this small space, those meek dots in the air that drifted with lazy sweet ease across my bare world.

I would have to get up, scratch my balls, take a leak, start this day. (Oh, the mundane, humiliating steps we must take to stay human!) How many more hours until I might sleep once again? Too many. That fever dream might return that very same night. Making me gasp, almost choke. I spat up only air, the fear was so great. I could not breathe, I wanted it so.