The forbidden jungle

  The waterfall had always been a lonely place, as it was located deep within the jungle. No one would have ever reached it on purpose, instead stumbling into it by mistake. It was said that the waterfall and its lagoon had the capacity to change locations and appear wherever people needed them to be. Many explorers and escapees from a nearby prison wandered into the jungle and got lost for days. Many of them, to be honest most of them, where eaten up by the jungle, whether it was by the fiery creatures inhabiting it or by the secrets that lay beyond the trees and the mossy ground. There were no natives to the jungle that could tell anyone about what lived beyond the first few kilometres simply because no living being, at least of the human species, had ever been able to come back.

 In satellites pictures, the jungle appeared to be dark green and even black in some parts. And it was all trees and trees, no sign of any waterfall or lagoon, which was only none to those few that had wandered into the jungle and survived. But as said before, these people never left the jungle. Instead, they remained in there, slowly transforming into wandering souls that helped protect the jungle and the secret within it. People that suffered this faith would not suffer or deny their destiny. Once they realized why they should give up their natural lives, they gave it all willingly. After all, those who survived were always the best humans, the examples of what was good and admirable about the human race.

 Such a person was Captain Roma Tennant. When she entered the navy, so many years ago, her peers only saw her as one of the women of the ship. But they had no idea she was far stronger and more capable than any of the men that worked with her in any of the Navy’s vessels. She was always the most oriented and the fastest one, also having great skills for shooting. She was prized several times, always involved in missions of war but far from any real battle. When she was finally sent to it, she became easily traumatized. She saw the few friends she had made in the Navy died, blowing up next to her or simply falling to their knees, a bullet in their foreheads. Her mind, however, got to hold on.

 The bit of sanity that remained in Roma was enough to destroy one of the enemies’ battle stations, thereby giving a perfect position for support troops to launch an attack that would make them win the fight. They did win, after many more casualties and Roma was able to survive, killing even more men and hiding in a sewage pipe. She was rescued by her country and brought back home but the truth was that Roma had been devastated by her, her mind almost broken by images of flying limbs and blood tainting every single drop of water. Her recovery took many months and her family thought they had lost her forever.

 And, in a way, they did. When Roma was able to walk again and use her arms and speak, she told them that she couldn’t live in the city anymore, as the sounds there reminded her of the sounds of battle. Cars and cell phones and planes made her very uneasy, very nervous. So her solution was to go and live by the sea, buy a boat with the money they had paid her for her services in the military, and simply live a quiet life in the ocean. She had to win the respect of her fellow men, once again, by proving she could easily manage to control a fishing boat, a cargo ship and even a small ferry to transport people across a small stretch of water.  She did exactly that at first and then travelled across the globe, working in jobs not very different, trying to bring peace to her mind and food to the table.

 She went to every big port in the world but, as she had realized before, cities were not for her, not even their harbours and marinas. She would settle for smaller towns, where she could be around people that she could recognize every day. But that eventually gave her more problems as she was reminded of the many people she had lost in battle. After one of her episodes, she was institutionalized for several months. This time, she had no family nearby and no one apparently notified them of her state. She remained in her cell, receiving shock therapy, which they still thought would be of any good in the country where she was. Eventually, they let her go when they saw she was calmer, less violent.

 Roma left that country fast and ended up in Indonesia, where she established herself as a fisherwoman. The locals there were not very happy to see her, a woman, trying to compete with all the men. She felt so harassed, that she decided to move upstream, through a large river that crossed a huge jungle. There she would finally be alone and she would be able to have a decent life for the remainder of her days, no matter how many they would be. She then noticed that explorers, scientists from all over who saw the jungle as an incredible source of discoveries, frequently visited the region. They said that a new animal was discovered every six hours and a new plant every eight hours.

 It was hard to believe such tales but Roma decided it was business and she dedicated herself to tour the scientists up and down the river and even through some canals and streams she had discovered. All the foreigners that got on her boat always came back as she was more daring than most people of the region and they knew it was because she had seen more of the world than they had. For a couple of years, explorers became her friends and she would always be there to greet them and take them wherever they needed to do their research. She had fun doing it, as she felt at peace for once in her life and it felt good.

 That changed the day she met Alexander Epps, an American scientist that had heard tales of the forbidden jungle and arrived in the region asking loudly for someone to take him there. Everyone said no, even Roma. She didn’t know all the tales, but she did know that the region of the jungle he was asking to go was very tricky in terms of navigability. She was skilled enough to go, she was sure, but it was difficult to live there and ignore the stories she had heard, about teams of twenty people that left for the jungle and never came back. Boats that appeared out of nowhere in the river and people recognized them as the ones that had transported lost souls to that dark patch of the forest. Roma was an adventurous woman, but she was no fool at all.

 However, Epps was a scientist and his research had also dropped the name of Roma. How it was known she lived there now, was never truly explained. Nevertheless Epps came to talk to her and tried to convince her to take him to the forbidden jungle. He insisted for months and she always said no. But then, as intelligent and twisted as Epps had always being, he tricked Roma into watching some images and footage of the war she had been in. He bombarded her with information, facts and so on. Just as he predicted, she snapped. But before she could lose herself to her own mind, Epps convinced her that the only way to purge herself from everything was to make a good deed and that was to tale him to the jungle.

 The next day, she took his team of ten men in her boat and carried them upstream. As expected, the jungle grew thicker, until it was impossible to keep advancing by boat. She told Epps it was her time to return but he threatened her with a gun and made her walk in front of him. None of that mattered anyways as in only one night; all the men of the expedition would be killed. Roma had not seen such carnage, not even in war. There were gigantic snakes breaking the bones of men, jaguars that destroyed a person in minutes and huge birds with beaks that could poke out eyes in the easiest way possible. The last one to die was Epps, who was impaled by a shadow Roma had seen before.

 Alones and in the brink of insanity, Roma wandered through the jungle, trying to get out of there but knowing one of the beasts was probably waiting for her. She was getting impatient, asking for the jungle to eat her, to destroy her life once and for all. But then she heard the humming of the water and, some steps in front of her; there was a perfect lagoon and a great waterfall where she cleansed herself from everything. Even her memories seemed to leave her as she washed her body. And then, beyond the trees, she saw a light. At first she thought it was an animal but then she realized it had the shape of a human being. Whatever it was, it was asking her to come towards him.

 Slowly, Roma did exactly that. The entity was one of the many souls that lived in the forest, one of the oldest apparently. It took Roma by the hand and took her to a trip where she left her body and transformed into a better version of herself. They wandered all around the jungle until the spirit took her deep within the trees, beyond the killer animals and the poisonous plants, beyond the waterfall and its soothing waters. There, in a space covered by plant life, there was a rock. It was the colour of blood and looked harmless. The spirit invited her to touch it and, when she did, she felt complete. And she understood why no one that wasn’t worthy could ever survive the forbidden jungle.

Torn

   I just kept running, until I woke up and realized there was nothing to run away from. I was sweating a bit and breathing heavily, as if I had really been running on the street. I just sat down on my bed and tried to calm down. There was nothing more that I could do than calm down and try to sleep again. After all, I had woken up at five in the morning and it was a Saturday. I decided to go to the kitchen, have some orange juice and then go back to my bed and lay there until sleep appeared again. To be honest, I was a bit scared of dreaming all of that again but I knew that was very unlikely. When I got sleepy again, I just covered myself entirely with the sheets and the bedspread. I didn’t dream a thing and woke up some four hours after, not really rested but at least calmed.

 That day, I decided to visit my family’s grave in the cemetery. I don’t know why, but I needed to do that. Somehow, I thought those awful dreams had come again only because my family was resentful of me not tending to them properly, not even thinking about them or putting some flowers on their graves. SO that was exactly what I did. I bought the most beautiful little bouquets and put them on their graves. I didn’t pray, I never did, but instead tried to apologize to them because I had been such a bad son. I knew coming to a cemetery didn’t really change anything, but I knew that I had left my family to one side, as if they had never existed. I cried a bit while asking for forgiveness and it was then that she appeared.

 It sounds insane but she was the woman of my dreams. And by that I mean she’s the one that appears there every time. I didn’t remember if she had a name in my dreams but once I saw her straight into the eyes, I realized she knew exactly whom I was and was there to talk to me. However, we just looked at each other as if talking or moving was the stupidest thing we could ever do. But finally, it was me who asked her what she was doing there, why she had come. The woman seemed confused at first, but then realized something and a smile appeared on her lips. She just said “I’ll be waiting in the car” and turned around. Ten minutes later, after saying goodbye to my parents, I was walking towards a car I knew to be hers, even if I hadn’t see it before.

 I opened the passenger door and sat down. I closed the door and she started the engine. She told me my car would be at my home in no time, but I didn’t care because I was beginning to fell like in my dream. Not as scared but I knew something was coming and I had to be calm in order to get to the bottom of everything. The woman drove the car out of the city and after an hour we had traveled several kilometers. We finally arrived to a small, quiet town, where se parked the car in the main square and told me to follow her, once again. We walked two blocks and then we entered a house.

 The house was not abandoned or anything. There was a family watching TV there but they seemed to ignore us, or something stranger… We crossed the house to the other side, where we got to a different street. There, the woman waited for a moment and hen opened another door I hadn’t even seen. I followed her and realized it was the same place where I had been tortured in my dreams.  I turned around to escape but the door was locked. She had sat down on a very old chair and seemed to be in deep thinking about who knows what. It didn’t seem that the torture would continue but, still, I was very nervous and had no intention of staying there more than was necessary. I wondered who she was and why I was following her like a mad man but felt the answers would not come easily.

 She finally seemed to remember where she was and walked towards me. She got closer, as if she want to kiss me but in reality she just checked my neck. Then, I felt a very horrible pain in the neck, where she had touched, falling to the ground as if was much more pain than I could resist standing up. Somehow, it felt like I had blood all over my hands and neck but when the pain passed, I realized there was nothing there, I was clean. I could see that she was now by a table, checking something that was apparently small in size. I had a thought of killing her and ending all of this in a single moment but then I realized I had nothing to do it with. Not a knife or even a good piece of wood.

 The woman turned around and indicated me to come to her side. I complied, but I really didn’t trust her and I did it even less now that she had taken something from me. That something was the thing she had been checking on the table, a small object shaped like a cylinder. Actually, it was bigger than what I felt in my dreams and the moment she had taken it out. And why wasn’t there any blood if that thing had been inside of me? I realized then that I had been left alone, that the woman was nowhere to be seen. I ran to the door and realized it was still locked, putting a very string barrier between me and everything outside. I wanted to run away, to just stop reliving that stupid dream but I couldn’t, somehow it was all real.

 I checked the object on my hand and felt something strange, as if I knew what it was used for. My gut told me it was some kind of implant to follow me, to make sure I did whatever the person that had put that on me wanted me to do. But why would I be of anyone’s interest? I was a failed artist that survived working the most menial job in a bank where, every single day, I just wanted to kill myself or at least kill several other people. Why would anyone be interested in following me or doing anything to my life or my body? Weren’t there others that were at least much more interesting in any aspect?

 The woman came back but this time she didn’t lock the door. She told me she had been checking on the object with people she knew and realized it was an old implant that was no longer functioning on the moment of extraction. She also said that, while it had probably some effect on my behavior for the last few years, it had stopped whatever it was it was meant to do several years ago. But that was even stranger because why would someone put an implant on a young person that had nothing to gain or loose form life? Why where they monitoring me? And who were they?  But she didn’t have those answers, she said she only tracked to device and found me and just needed to know which ones were still active and which ones weren’t.

 Apparently, although she didn’t say it in full words, she was doing all of this out of guilt. She had worked with the creators of the devices and now felt it was her moral obligation to remove them all; before they had any serious consequences on the people they had been implanted in. It was pretty alarming, but during all that time she was talking, explaining her reasons and trying for me to understand who she was and what she had been doing, I just wanted to kill her. It was a feeling I had never felt before, like an urge but it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. I wanted to feel her neck broken in my hands and the taste of her blood. And then, I noticed she had seen it in me.

 Too late. I launched myself at her and tried to strangle her with my own two hands. I pressed hard, feeling her fighting against my superior strength and superior mind. Her life was running out and I smiled because that’s what I wanted. I not just her but everyone else too. I realized my goal was to kill every single person in the world and that, if I wanted to do it, I could do it. I smile even more and when she stopped breathing, I laughed and felt like I was in the happiest place in the world. I left her lifeless body on the floor and the smiled all around me, realizing my poor and might and thinking of how much more I could do for my needs and for me. The world was absolutely mine.

 I got out of the house and walked up the street, now in the dark as the night had fallen during my stay in that awful place. I kept smiling for some more until I got a bullet straight between my eyes and fell to the ground. I died instantly but the fun part was that I hadn’t died. Somewhere far away, I woke up again and realized something worse had been done to me. Not only that device had turned me into a murder, it wasn’t a piece of metal to know where I was but whom I was. The one that died was just a clone that had gone insane and the real me… Well, I still don’t know where I am. But I’m scared of what might come.

Negligence

   As soon as the water touched her skin, the stains of dirt and blood began to fall to the shower floor and they would disappear down the drain. She was trembling a bit still, shocked by what had happened earlier. She tried to clean herself with soap, distracting her from what she had in mind, but she just couldn’t stop thinking about it. She made the flow of water to run faster, for more water to fall on her. Her unconscious wanted to drown her, feeling that would be the only way they could keep on living. But of course, she didn’t drown in her shower. She just stayed there for several minutes, as if she needed to clean more from her body that only the dirt and the blood. When she finally closed the water, she stayed there against the wall, incapable of crying, incapable of feeling anything.

 The rest of that day she spent it home. She had no need or wanted to parade herself around town, not after what had happened. The images of what had happened invaded her mind every few seconds, and she wondered if she would ever feel safe and sane again. She lay in her bed hours and hours, without eating or drinking anything. Her phone rang several times as well as her cellphone, but she just didn’t answer. She knew it was office related and she hated to be disturbed by anything related to it on weekends, even in better days for her. Or maybe it was her parents that had the tradition of calling her every Sunday afternoon because they knew it was the slowest and most boring day for her in the week.

 When the phone rang again, she was tempted to grab it but finally decided against it. Talking may have resulted in awkward reactions, maybe then she would be able to cry or scream and it just wouldn’t be appropriate, as too many things would have to be explained. Instead, she decided to head to the kitchen and have some water. She felt dry and a bit dizzy but knew that she couldn’t hold any food. She went to the bathroom and tried to vomit but that was a failure. She just returned to bed and lay there for the rest of the day, in silence, without a single person to help her understand what was going to happen to her. Because the truth was that she was scared for her life, as she felt the every single thing had changed.

 She hated to admit it, but she did feel different. Later that day, she went to the bathroom and spent several minutes looking at her reflection in the mirror. She moved, looking at her every feature. And as much as she thought that the change had been physical too, she had no way to prove that. She looked exactly the same, maybe a little but paler but no other difference besides that. The poor woman passed her hands over her face several times, as if trying to wake up fro ma bad dream, but she didn’t wake up. Instead, she decided to go back asleep, something that scared her immensely as she had no wish of having nightmares.

 The following day, she woke up an hour early, with big bags under her eyes. She showered, put on her work clothes and then had a big breakfast with toast, scrambled eggs, a sausage and some orange juice. She was starving from the day before. It was then that she realized that wanting to be dead didn’t help anyone at all, less of all her. She had to keep on going and just live like any other person. What she had done had been definitive, but s many had done it before her and the world was not going to end because of it. As she had breakfast, she watched the news on her TV but nothing interesting had happened the day before or that morning, at least as far as the televisions news world was concerned. When finished, she just grabbed her coat and left.

 Some forty-five minutes later, she was arriving at her desk, leaving her coat on a hanger on one of the sides of her cubicle. The morning was cold and everyone had decided to put on their coats back on, even going as far as putting on scarves or gloves. The morning went on without a single accident or incident. There was always someone complaining about the low amount of paper in the copy machine or someone else commenting on the weather, but that day everyone seemed to be too cold to even speak as much as they normally did. When she decided to grab a cup of coffee, as she always did, she realized that something was happening on the ground floor. She could see people gathering from the twenty-second floor, where she was standing.

 Then, a couple of police patrols arrived and finally an ambulance. Maybe someone had fainted or had been… Yes, one of the paramedics rushed out of the ambulance as soon as his vehicle had stopped. The police were putting the yellow ribbon around the place to stop the people from coming in. In the coffee room, other people had arrived and were looking exactly at what she was looking at. One of them finally said “Oh my god, it’s a body!” and she realized that was it. There was a person down there, probably dead. Maybe he or she had jumped from one of the many floors of the tower or maybe something else had happened. Any way, their supervisor came and asked them all to go back to their desks.

 At lunch, everyone wanted to know what had happened and the most skilled people with gossip knew everything about it within a couple of minutes of being down there talking to other people that loved to gossip. Apparently, the one who had jumped had been a woman, by the name of Marcela Jones. Marcela worked in the twentieth floor, in a company that had something to do with electronics. The point was, she had just run for the window and fell to her death. So it was a suicide and as our woman heard this, she felt sick to her stomach and had to run to the toiled. For the rest of the workday, she felt very sick.

 She felt better once the day was over and she was on a bus home. But maybe the word wasn’t better, but less likely to do the same thing that Marcela had done. It was crazy but she had seen that woman’s face once that week and it hadn’t been at work. It had been in another place, one that she was trying to forget but that kept coming back to her mind. Worried by these visions, she remained in her room all night, again without eating. She was thinking about what had happened today and what had happened over the weekend. The two had to be related, especially after she had seen the news and realized the state of Marcela’s body. She felt like shit, thinking and thinking without really achieving anything. She felt guilty and sick to her stomach.

 But by the following morning, she knew what she had to do and it was maybe the toughest decision she had ever taken. Instead of leaving for her work, she decided to go to the nearest police station. There, she asked for someone to listen to her testimony, as she wanted to confess a crime she had committed. She felt awful, waiting for an agent to come to talk to her. She gone to the police station by her work, as they knew more about Marcela’s death that anyone else. Finally, a detective asked her to follow him to an interrogation room and then he asked if she could state her name and profession for the record.

 Her name was Linda Bloom and she worked as business consultant in the biggest firm in the city. She wanted to confess that on the night of the previous Saturday, she had assassinated a man, whom she blamed for the suicide of Marcela Jones. The detective was surprised but the first thing that he asked was about the relation between her actions and Marcela. Linda explained that Stuart Carter, the man she had killed, had brutally assaulted several women for the last few months in the city. She knew this because she had managed to escape and, after killing him with a hammer, she had seen some pictures in his house, from where she recognized Marcela’s face. The officer asked her for the address of the house where she had killed Carter and left her there.

 Hours later he came back, and she was officially arrested. They had found the body where she had told them that they would find it and also the albums of pictures the man took of the women he had apparently assaulted. They had no proof of this just then, but with time they would find out that the man was a monster and that the only person that ever stood in his way was Linda. She had been able to grab the hammer after she escaped his “studio” and just hit him in the head with it several times. She did it until he stopped moving and then just ran out, covered in blood and filth from the place they were in.

 Linda had to wait for a trial until all the evidence was gathered and, by the time they decided to convict her, at least six months had already passed. Although it was revealed that she was going to be the man’s last victim, she had failed to report the murder sooner and had neglected to tell the police about the pictures she had seen, which could have prevented Marcela’s death. Linda was condemned to five years in prison and that time was enough to make her loose all her will to live. She died behind bars only a year after entering the penitentiary.

Nightmares

   I woke up breathing heavily but without screaming or doing any more noises. I had no clothes on but I could feel my body drenched in sweat, as if I had been running for quite a while. I grabbed my phone, which I had left by the bed, and checked the time: only a half hour had passed since I had fallen asleep. I was trembling and stayed there, sitting on my bed looking at the bedspread, not thinking at all. Then, I tried to remember what it was that I had dreamt off and I could just remember a few images, a few horrible images of creatures and scary situations. But the most awful thing was that I had felt paralyzed for a while. I mean, I had thought I was awake but I wasn’t and I felt and heard a sound coming at me from behind.

 I think I was paralyzed like that for at least three minutes but even such little time felt like an eternity. It felt like that being or that person behind me was going to be successful at attacking me, probably wanting to kill me for some reason. In that moment, I wanted to scream for help but I couldn’t, my mouth wouldn’t open and my eyes were frozen open. It was the worst kind of torture I could have thought of. I woke up just after that and thanked my body for helping me in that dire moment of need. As I stood up, walking to the kitchen for some water, I realized that the temperature outside had dropped even more in those thirty minutes I had been asleep. The cold was harsh so early in the morning so I decided to drink fast and put on some clothes to sleep.

 I didn’t fall asleep right away. To be honest, I was afraid I would keep dreaming those awful things so I just thought about other things. But the paralysis I had suffered earlier came back to me and I felt scared, more than before.  It had happened before and that was probably why I was so nervous about it. What was the reason of that? Why did it happen to me and why like that? It was a mystery I’d rather not explore but that’s how things were and I hated it. I didn’t want any more things in my mind right now, less of all a dream night were every single part looked like the perfect kind of torture. Was my mind just telling me that I was going insane?

 Hours later, at work, I didn’t mention my dreams to anyone. I tried to behave as I always did, crazy free. I even engaged in the typical lunch conversations, which was odd, as I preferred to listen and not to talk. That was because what I said was almost always perceived as “too much” or radical in some way, so I stopped talking at that time. But that day I must have forgotten my own rule because I talked and talked like a parrot and the fun thing was that some of the people agreed on why I said and other seemed to agree but didn’t want the rest to think they were as “radical” as me. That day in the office was good and, after lunch, I didn’t remember a single thing about my nightmares.

 They didn’t come back to me until late at night, when I was surprised to remember an especially gruesome part of my earlier nightmares. Apparently I had dreamt that I was some kind of murderer. I had never witnessed such things in real life and did not understand how my mind was able to replicate that situation, but there I was. It was clear to me now that I had walked amongst corpses, on a floor were every single centimeter was covered in blood. And that wasn’t the most shocking part. I was carrying a chainsaw in one hand and had my body covered in blood too, stepping on it as I walked through the room. I believe that was just a dream fragment, I don’t think there was more. But it had been enough to make me avoid sleeping at all that night? What was going on with me?

 The next day, more than one person asked me if I had slept at all. Apparently my eyes were pretty scary and my face looked horribly pale. I washed it at least twice but it didn’t make a change. I still looked like someone out of a horror movie. That day, I went back to not participating in conversations. I decided to skip lunch altogether, preferring to have some chocolate on a park bench nearby. The sugar made me feel alive and with enough energy to withstand the day. Maybe I had to do something special to avoid these dreams or at least to stop the memories of them coming in my head. I just wanted to go back to before, when I never had any kind of dreams, not even the typical ones people have.

 Suddenly, someone sat besides me on the bench and I realized it was this guy I liked from the office. He had arrived to work with us very recently and I felt he liked me back. I asked him what he was doing there and he told me that he had followed me. I must have opened my mouth very wide because he laughed and said that he had actually come out of a nearby restaurant and happened to se me alone so he just wanted to check on me. I asked why and he said I seemed distracted. He also mentioned the sleeping part. We stayed there for the remainder of lunchtime and when we went back, we had decided to meet in my house that night in order to watch a movie and have some take out.

 As it was Friday, many people were going dancing or drinking but we had decided to share a movie and we hadn’t done that ever before. It had been the first time we decided to meet outside of work so I was nervous about it. When I got home, I decided to check my computer for the best movies I had around. I chose three so we could see them all or he could chose his favorite. We could order anything and I changed my clothes to something less work related. I wanted everything to look good and on point, to look as if I worried about everything been clean and nice. Normally my place was a mess but I managed to make it presentable in short time.

 Then, the memories kicked in again. I wasn’t paralyzed or a butcher anymore. But I was tied to the floor with a metal chain and I was trying to release myself from it. I pulled with the little strength I still had but it was useless, the chain wouldn’t break. Then someone came in, someone whose face I never saw and he started to kick me and punch me and then… And then he did something I can’t even process, something… Something I didn’t understand when I realized I was remembering another part of that awful dream. Why was it happening now? Why did it keep coming back? This time I was drenched in sweat again but I had no time to change or to clean myself as the doorman called to tell me that my buddy from work had arrived. I wasn’t excited about it anymore.

 My legs shook as I got near the door and waited to open the door. I couldn’t just send him back to his house so I was just going to have a nice evening and tried to forget what I had just seen. I clean the sweat of my face with my sleeve and opened just as he had pressed the doorbell. He was surprised I opened that fast but he just laughed and we hugged as we greeted each other. I took him to my sofa and offered him a beverage but as I poured the two glasses of wine, my hands shook like crazy but he was talking about something so he didn’t really notice. We talked fro some minutes before I told him which movies I had picked and he said he liked them all so we could just try to watch them all that evening. I agreed so I asked him to put some popcorn in the microwave as I set up the movie.

 Minutes later, we had turned off the light, on his request, and were side by side eating popcorn and trying to concentrate on the movie. The truth was that I wanted to focus on him but couldn’t. I was still too shaken by what I had seen. I was been wondering if going to a shrink was the best idea. I needed someone else to know and to tell me I was just being crazy and that nothing from my nightmares could attack me, ever. I knew that maybe that was obvious but I needed to hear it from someone else. Then, I got scared and almost threw the popcorn bowl to the floor as he touched my hand. I was so ashamed I stopped the movie and just told him.

 I explained my nightmares, my fears and why I had been acting so weird. I told him because I needed someone to know, I needed to share those feeling with someone else. When I finished, he took my hands on his own and pressed them gently. He told me that I wasn’t a bad person for having nightmares and that maybe my imagination was too active or I had eaten before going to bed. It was common to have horrible nightmares sometimes and maybe I was just scared that what happened in them could actually happen some day. He assured me, with the confidence of a doctor, that I would never be that person in my dreams.

 I hugged him, we shared a kiss and, surprisingly, we watched two whole movies before we decided it was too late. He asked me to call him a taxi but I never dialed. I came in from behind and hugged him. I think I scared him. The thing is, he stayed the night and I never had those nightmares again. I’m not saying it was because of him but maybe my mind needed to focus on something else and what better than a nice, intelligent prospect? But sometimes I remember the nightmares and I wonder who I am and why I am.