~*This is just another tidbit from the story I'm writing. I got such a positive response on the last segment that I decided to post this one. I'm not happy with it and will likely make a few edits but...oh well. Thanks for viewing, comments welcome as always.*~ It all started as it usually did: first with the rain, and then with the hands grabbing me. Rough hands...evil hands...scraping the flesh on my stomach and face, covering my mouth and pulling me as if I were born from the mud I was being dragged down into. And I woke up sweating and screaming every single time. The dream had been no different than all the nights before. Of course, it’s not like I had expected it to be, so there was no room for disappointment to crowd in alongside the terror and pain. I nearly leapt from my pillow in an attempt at getting away from the nightmare, but as usual, it didn’t work. My nightshirt clung to the sweat-drenched skin of my back, chilling me as soon as it lost contact with the bed sheet. I groped around on the side of my bed, trying to find my cell phone, and pressed a random button to make it light up once my hand traced over it. 4:38am. Shit. How was I supposed to get back to sleep now? I had to be up in two hours. Sleeping would be pointless, for the most part. "Ugh...mom’s gonna be pissed..." Poor mom, dealing with an insomniac daughter; waking up to bloodcurdling screams in the middle of the night; spending hours on the phone with therapists and sleep study clinics to try and find me help. And the medications she’d gotten me: sleeping pills, antidepressants, herbal supplements - but the thing was, I wasn’t depressed outside of before I went to bed and once I woke up. Still, it meant the world to me that she tried. "It’s the trying that matters, not the succeeding," she had told me as a kid. Oh well. At least the trying counted for something, since there hadn’t been any success yet. The most recent therapist had told me to write my feelings when I woke up from the dreams, as if it was a theory that we hadn’t heard before. So I grabbed the notebook and pen that had stayed by my bed since that visit twenty-one days before, and flipped twenty-one pages ahead to the next blank sheet, counting as I went. I pressed the button on my phone again to light up the paper and started scrawling. Beautiful intricacies get tangled somewhere, and turn ugly, and fierce. And sometimes pain isn't obvious. It stays hidden and only comes out in the dark, almost in anticipation for what the night is going to bring. A secret knowing. Waiting for you to sleep. Dreams aren’t sweet. And you wonder what you have left when the only place that’s supposed to be safe isn’t safe anymore. Sometimes you think you won't wake up. Sometimes the A tear slapped on the page, fat and destructive to the delicate blue lines on the notebook paper. The notebook began to shake violently, and I thought something had possessed it until I realized that the cause for the movement was the hands that held it. I tossed the notebook to the floor and hiked the blanket up over my shoulders. It was the second-best thing to someone’s arms. If my hysteria had been any worse, I’d likely have woken mom up. But she had held me the night before, and the night before that. Mom needed her sleep. I had to be a big girl and handle it myself. So I held the blanket as tightly as I could, opening my eyes as wide as possible to try and keep myself from falling back to sleep. The only thing to do now was wait for sunlight. Only a couple more hours to go. I waited, finishing the thought that I hadn’t finished penning. Sometimes the scariest part is going back to sleep.