Lights

The lights in this building need to be replaced.

I can't see myself in the window reflection anymore. I'm nervous in the dark, I like to be able to see my eyes and remind myself I'm not dreaming. It's been hard to separate those dreams from reality lately. Sometimes I don't think I would even be surprised if that fat old woman down the hall knitted her fingers into her never-ending scarf. Maybe she really does turn into a green-eyed cat when I'm not looking.

The dreams started a few months ago, normal dreams, quiet dreams, the ones that you'd tell your best friend about. Little, impossible things would happen... I cut down trees with a pair of scissors and a little man in yellow followed me around the garage. He frightened me, but when I woke up he was just lemon mist in the cold steel of reality. Sometimes I'd try to write the dreams down, maybe turn them into stories to tell people when I couldn't entertain any other way, but my attention span was too short and the dream journals were left unfinished and sorrowful.

After a time, the dreams started switching around. Sometimes I'd be sitting in that fat old woman's living room, smelling the curry she was always burning and watching her knit and listen to her talk about highschool sweethearts and limited-edition tea. I'd done this thousands of times, counting it mentally as assisting the elderly, like it was a wild card for the Good Person title. So she'd knit, and talk, and I'd eat stale cake and sit and sit and listen, and then her fingers would weave in and out of the knitting and stretch down her arms. Soon the scarf was up to her shoulders, half yarn and half fingers. The cake would fall out of my mouth and I'd just watch, her voice drifting into the background.

I'd wake up after that.

The walls in my apartment were never very solid. The woman next door can't stand her boyfriend anymore, but is too shy to say anything to his face. She just cries whenever they have a disagreement, and he turns into a long green snake and the room starts filling up with shoes and broken bracelets.

And I'd wake up.

The lights in this building need to be replaced. They're yellow and dreary and remind me of horror flicks and too much caffeine. I can't see my reflection in the window anymore and it's uncomfortable. I think that I'm dreaming when I listen to that poor woman next door crying, but I don't hear the sound of that green snake and broken bracelets don't come pouring out of the air shafts.

Maybe I'm not.

I'll go and replace those spooky yellow lights and they'll be nice and bright. I forget to look in the mirror on my way out the door, but when I walk down the hall again, it's all back to how it was before. It's too dark to see my reflection. I hurry to the fat old woman's apartment and eat her stale cake like it's the only food I've ever tasted... but her arms never knit into her scarf and her stories keep dragging.

The woman next door tells her boyfriend it's over.

And again the next night.

And again.

The fat old woman has four hundred and thirteen scarves and none of them have her fingers in them. I counted them all while she was baking more cake, already stale from the oven.

The lights go back and forth from shiny-white new to Frankenstein-eye yellow. I cut off my hair and it's down to my ankles when I wake up. I sleep and I'm tired, I drink and I'm thirsty. The lights still need to be replaced. My reflection talks to me when insomnia is my only friend. Memories bounce back and forth, numbers stand on their hands and strangle the letters. Books are too hard to read; I forgot everything I knew.

Yet when I wake up, the lights are white and the woman next door is still crying and the fat old woman is still working on the same scarf she's been working on for the past month. Or year. Or seventy years. My reflection blinks at me, perfectly lined up with my own eyes. I'm sure I forgot my college thesis, I think I've been fired from my waitressing job. I wander down to the restaurant anyway and they put me to work as if nothing's happened.

"Are you losing your mind?" I ask myself. Nobody answers.

I turn in my college thesis and graduate.

That night, I scramble to finish the paper, proofreading it four times before noticing I spelled "fanatic" with a K and an E. I spill my tea and have to rewrite a whole page. The woman next door screams that it's over, it's over, it's over. Bracelets flood my carpet. I can't remember how to read, the letters bunch up and fall over and it's just scribbles. I wrote my whole paper scribbling like a child.

I wake up and it's quiet.

So quiet.

And white.

I sit up and the bracelet on my wrist falls to the ground.