In Purple

Every inch of me is covered in purple.

        Glitter leaves its trail on my skin, and it is so real I cannot only see it but touch it. I run my fingers over the hairs on my arms, so light I can barely see them, tracing the pattern of the stars on my skin. I know I am listening to my heartbeat through my skin, and I know it’s the Universe telling me I’m still alive.

       Then, it all starts caving in. This is the part where I can see the corners of the sky folding in on me, the purple merge into pitch-black darkness, the stars not exploding, but fading until I can’t even grab them.

       That’s always when I wake up.

       My name is Duncan, and I’ve been having this dream ever since I was five years old. Now, I’m thirteen. I’ve meant to tell you about it – tell someone, anyone, about it – but I don’t know where to begin. Because it is a dream, after all. Because glitter stars and purple galaxies aren’t supposed to coat me like my blankets do at night, except they do. And they leave me warmer, too.

       The hardest thing to understand is some days, the limit between the dream and what’s real starts to fade. I look out the window at school and see stars plastered in what would otherwise be a daydream. I am wide awake, but the voices around me sound distant, away.

       When I am in this dream, I float. And not like flying, because flying sounds like it would need too much of my energy. I would imagine wind would be dashing past me, sending me into the unknown. But in this dream, I just float. There’s no direction, no amount of weight, nothing involved. It’s me in the middle of nothing. And it’s addicting, really.

       One day I figured out I had to wake up. It just came up to me, something in my head said, “you’ve been here too long. You need to move.” But I didn’t know how to, and it was terrifying. I looked around me, and for once, the emptiness, the blanket of purples, and swirling blues embroidered with stars seemed frightening instead of inviting. How was I ever to get home?

       And that’s when I decided to scream.

       Now, in case you don’t know, sound can’t travel through space. So I yelled, but my surroundings snatched what I had to say as if it never were. I haven’t been able to fathom why my brain decides to be reasonable with things like these but allows me to breathe in space when I’m also not supposed to.

       For the first time, I felt like I was choking and not from lack of air, but because I felt trapped. My mind was jumping to all these worst-case scenarios, and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t scream or speak. All I could do was float around, and for once, that didn’t seem like enough.

       And then, it hit me.

       I had to think.

       “I need help getting back, please. I need to wake up.”

       My eyes were closed shut tightly as if I was terrified as to what awaited if I opened them. And that’s because I was. Because the darkness might still be extending over an endless horizon for all, I knew. But a voice gave me bravery.

       “Kid, don’t be silly. You wake up from dreams and this? This isn’t a dream.”

       And there it was. He was, I guess. So I opened my eyes, and I immediately found myself hitting the ground. Stars were still extended all above, rolling into infinity at the pace of a thousand years. And in front of me, was an old, tall man with no hair, but a beard so long and white it covered a significant portion of his body.

       “What do you mean it’s not a dream? And who are you?” I thought. This was the first time the pattern of the dream had changed, the first time in eight years.

       “Well, I don’t know how much clearer I can be,” I heard him say in my head as I saw him smile, “you’re not dreaming. You are something special, Duncan. And for that, they have chosen you.”

       “Who are they? And I’m sorry, but this isn’t making any sense. There is no way that I am actually in outer space right now, there is no…”

       “…explanation? Well, Duncan, I would imagine you out of all people would know there are a lot of things in the Universe without explanation humans understand.”

       And in a second, I knew what he meant. And I knew he wasn’t lying. I knew I wasn’t dreaming, and I also understood that somewhere within me, I had always known this was real. That the tingling in my body was a little too palpable each morning to have been a dream. I understood that ordinary people don’t have their dreams and realities overlap like collages. But I could not understand why.

       “Well, what are you afraid of?” I heard him say. I forgot we could listen to each other think, so he must have heard my entire reasoning.

       “I’m not afraid of anything,” I replied. And it wasn’t a complete lie. I am scared of spiders and a little bit of clowns, but these were human fears, rational even. And I knew his question went more profound than that. I knew spiders had nothing to do with me being in outer space.

       “Well, what makes you hurt, Duncan?”

       And I could see my mom in my head right then. I could see my mom leaving and not coming back, and I could see her on the worst nights when she did come back. When she came back holding the hand of some man that would rarely acknowledge me, or another that acknowledged me too much as if he were here to stay. As if he weren’t paying a quota for something that wasn’t for sale, for someone, no one could stamp a price on. Not one that captured her true worth, anyway.

       But all I could do was sit in my room.

       Some days I pretended I didn’t hear anything. I could still be out at school, or at my friends’ house if I had any. It’s not like she would know, though.

       But when she knows, when she sees me, when she cares: right there, I’m hooked. And I don’t want to let it go. She will smile at me one day and say, “hey kiddo, wanna get some ice cream?” and for a moment, I get to forget who is paying my ice cream. I get to forget my dad took everything, leaving only the late nights, the messy lunches I make for myself. And it’s just her and me. Until we get back, and the night falls upon us, and she’s gone.

       “Your mind is a portal, Duncan. You get to come here whenever you need to. You just happen to need it often.”

       And then, everything went bright. I felt something suck me in as if I was being swallowed and thrown into it of the Universe’s stomach, and a blinding light struck my sight. I was home, and daylight was coming in through my window, and I was wide awake.

       I don’t think I ever actually went to sleep.

       Throughout that entire day, I could not think about anything else but the old man and the stars swirling around my ankles. I couldn’t wait to go back to bed, so that night I went to sleep early and in no time I was back to swimming in a sea of stars.

       Every night it got harder to come home, though. I would have to think really hard, and some nights I was so sure I was not going to make it back that panic started seeping in, finding its way in between the gaps of my bones. But I always had, until one night I ran into the old man again.

       “You need to stop escaping, Duncan,” he said. He was sitting cross-legged on the moon as if it were just another piece of ground. I guess it was for him.

       “But I love it here.”

       “No, you don’t,” he said as he stood up. “You just hate home.”

       And something in me knew he was right. Something in me knew that as much as I loved floating through infinity, I would trade it in for a meal with mom. For dad to come home. For him to never have left.

       “You’re eventually not going to be able to find your way back. It’s getting harder and harder, the lines blurring, you know it deep within you, child. You’ve always been a smart kid.”

       “I don’t know how to stop it.”

       And that’s when I started sobbing. I fell on my knees, and I cried for everything. I cried because I knew I shouldn’t know what my mom’s job was. I knew none of those men saw her, I knew there was no going back from this. I knew all I wanted was to sit down with her and have her see me, have us understand each other, hear each other laugh, and just be. I wanted to be a kid, and that had been snatched away from me so badly I went all the way to outer space to find it. And I still hadn’t, not quite.

       “You don’t need to stop it, though, do you? You can learn to sit with it. You can learn to flourish through it. You can learn that you don’t have to be alone. Words hold magical power when spoken to the right people at the right time.”

       Exasperated, I replied, “what is that supposed to mean? Am I just supposed to tell my mom to see me? To listen? The reason she does what she does is to put food in my mouth. I can’t be mad at her for that. I just can’t.”

       “But you are, though. Suffering in silence is still suffering, but heavier.”

       And I learned then that he was right. That I needed to go home and talk to my mom, tell her that I needed to be a kid, just for a little bit. Just for a moment. I knew crying and asking her would always be better than leaving for space and never coming back to her.

       So that’s why I wrote this letter, and if you found it, then you and I are alike somehow. Because I left this hidden where only a child in pain would know, a child not meant for outer space, but too foreign for Earth as well.

       Meet yourself. Mirrors are just reflective glass.