I Once Dreamed of Happiness
by Daniel Beadle - Thursday, September 6, 2007
The man we label as Stalker feels a twist in his perception. Reality is defined by how it is perceived, and for this lonely man, his reality is in flux.Stalker looks out his window with a taste for nostalgia, not quite sure where the present separates from the past. He looks out his window at a lone street lamp on an empty street. His room, his world, is colored in blues and blacks, lost somewhere in twilight. He stares out the window with a longing that is never satisfied.
Stalker's thoughts become jumbled and unreliable. He thinks of how much he wants to eat dirt on a long stretch of desert highway and even though I’m right here you never knew exactly where I should be in your life that isn’t completely the same as his…
* * *
Graham wakes up. It’s not a sudden event. He stirs in his bed with his eyes shut, lost somewhere between the dream world and the waking world. His heavy eyelids lose their weight, and his eyes slowly widen and awaken.
Graham stares at the ceiling for a long while, and breathes a long sigh of… what? Content? Maybe. He rolls over on his left arm and looks at the girl lying next to him. Her eyes are closed, and she breathes softly, somewhere on the edge of a light sleep. He looks at her tangled mess of brown hair and its natural golden highlights. She is the very image of tranquility. And this makes Graham smile.
Graham reaches over to her with his right hand and brushes some of her hair out of her face and behind her ear. She smiles as she breathes out and lets slip a soft moan that suggests an extreme sense of comfort and slight amusement. Graham leans in and kisses her cheek very softly, and her smile widens. He then gives her a series of similar kisses, all over her cheek, so softly as to be nearly imperceptible. She chuckles as her eyes flutter open and stare at Graham.
“Butterfly kisses,” she purrs. Graham smirks. He looks into her eyes, and in the lighting, he can see how amazingly blue they are, with tiny flecks of gray that are only made obvious, he recalls, when she wears a gray T-shirt.
Graham moves his mouth next to her exposed ear. “Of course,” he whispers. He kisses the outside of her ear, letting his tongue flick the earlobe before the lips make their departure. He softly bites her earlobe and makes a low growling noise.
“You’re such a brat,” she says, pressing her face into the pillow.
“You love it,” he responds, as he pulls his face from her ear to look her in the eyes, mere inches away.
Her smile falls slightly and her face puts on an heir of seriousness. “I love you,” she says, stressing the word “love,” thereby making the entire sentence ooze with sincerity.
A look of satisfaction crosses Graham’s face as he looks into her eyes with a sense of complete adoration. “I love you too.”
Their lips meet, and both are lost in the moment. Each successive kiss is shorter than the previous one, and as they consider stopping, Graham pulls his face away to look into her eyes again. He plunges his face back into hers, kissing her mouth once, then kissing rapidly across her cheek and toward her ear as if he had fallen and was breaking his fall with a series of kisses.She starts laughing as he gnarls on her ear once more.
“Stop!” she manages to say between giggles.
“‘S my crash landing… I fell.” Her laughter becomes uncontrollable, as Graham begins to tickle her with his free hand.
“No… no fair… I’m ticklish!” she laughs.
“Aw, wheesht,” he responds.
She attempts a scowl, but it doesn’t quite work, as she says “don’t tell me to ‘wheesht’.” She jabs him in the stomach, and he stops.
“Alright alright. Calm down.” He looks at his left wrist, then at the digital alarm clock next to the bed. “How much time do we have?”
She smirks at him. “Why do you do that? You don’t wear a watch.”
“Habit. Sorry. Jeeze.”
She pushes him aside and sits up. “Not enough,” she mutters. Graham pulls her back down and kisses her firmly on the lips. “You really are a brat,” she whispers.
“I know.”
“But we really have to go.”
“I know.”
Jen sits up and slides off the bed. “I have to get dressed.”
Graham slumps over to his side, grumbling. He watches her walk toward the bathroom, removing her pajama bottoms on the way. Graham stares, fixated, at her ass, perfectly accentuated by her turquoise thong. As she moves out of sight, Graham rolls out of bed and jumps up, walking with an exaggerated but inaccurate sense of exhaustion. He busies himself in the kitchen as minutes slip by, and a partially dressed Jen returns, looking for some missing piece of her appearance.
Graham stands over the stove as eggs sizzle in the pan. He’s still shirtless, wearing his own baggy pajama bottoms as he cooks barefoot.
The two kiss briefly as Jen prepares herself some coffee and toast.
“Do you remember the first time I tried to make eggs?”
Jen chuckles. “Yeah, you almost ruined the pan.”
Graham smiles, muttering “grife.” He changes the subject as he watches her gather up her books her desk. “Do you have that test today?”
“Yup,” she shouts back. “I only told you about ten times.”
“Sorry, I’m a very self-absorbed person. You know that.” As Graham regrets his last words, he scrapes the eggs out of the pan onto some plates. “‘S ready.”
Jen returns. “I’m going to have lunch with Amanda at the campus center today, if that’s alright.”
“Sure.”
Jen moves the plates out to the dining table. She sits and eats as Graham follows and does the same.
“Did you sleep okay?” she asks.
“I was with you, wasn’t I?”
She smirks, and there’s a brief glint of affection in her eyes.
“I had this weird dream though… like I was this creepy guy who was obsessed with finding you.”
“Graham, don’t be creepy.”
“Hey, it was just my dream.”
More minutes pass, and more words are exchanged. But there’s a slight ripple in the flow of these events that is mildly noticeable at this moment.
Jen picks up her plate. “Are you done?”
“Yep.”
She grabs Graham’s plate and walks back to the kitchen.
Graham stands with a groan and looks out the window. “You and your noises,” Jen says as she returns from the kitchen. Her hands wrap themselves around him as she kisses his cheek.
Graham turns to face her. “Calm down.”
“I am calm,” she says.
They look at each other adoringly for what seems a full minute before Graham kisses her forehead. “Alright, you gotta jet, and I gotta get to work.”
She pouts.
“Shh. It’s okay. I’ll be here tonight. And we have the weekend coming up. So you and me and Katey and Brian can all go out and get hammered…” He pulls her in closer. “And we can sneak off and make out.”
She smiles as the two move in for a prolonged kiss. Graham eventually slaps her ass. “Alright, scoot. You gotta go.”
“I know.” She snatches up her bag and gives her hair a quick toss.
“You look great.” They kiss once more.
“I’ll call you when I get out of class.”
“’Kay.”
She exits, and Graham stands alone with an oddly satisfied smile on his face. He turns, and walks toward the window. He looks out over main street, as Jen emerges from the building and waves back at him. He smiles and gives a wave back.
Graham sighs with a deep sense of satisfaction, and then tosses himself back onto the disheveled bed. He stretches and relaxes, staring at the ceiling. He sighs.
“What a weird dream though. I would hate to lose her.” He closes his eyes for the briefest moment and then feels an overwhelming sense of nausea. He feels as if a small creature is clawing its way through his stomach, just as all the details of the room twist and morph into something dark and sinister. He vomits blood and slams his head against a wall, trying to comprehend the reality and scope of his situation. He feels his bowels writhe and convulse, as a sharp pain stabs through his torso. His body pales and withers, and his hair lengthens and falls into his face. Fresh scars pop up all over his arms and chest, and he begins crying.
Stalker lies on the floor of his room, not fully aware of his current status. Sometimes memories and fantasies get intertwined. Sometimes reality is interpretable and subjective. And as Stalker regains an awareness, as he remembers that he is a lonely stalker with no loved ones, no family, no friends, no job…
He understands that the purest form of misery comes from the loss of happiness. To visit heaven, and lose it, is infinitely more painful than never having heaven in the first place.
This is withdrawal.
This is hell.
“I have dreamed a dream… But now that dream is gone from me.”—Morpheus
