I’d like to dedicate this story to you. Yes, you. I’d like you to forget who you are and be a fictional character. See how you make fictional characters real in your mind? Do the opposite now. Make yourself fictional. Fictionalize yourself. Forget that you’re real. You’re part of my imagination now, okay? I’ll host you cross-legged with the thoughts that keep roaming inside me endlessly. You can get a book and read too, or warm up my mind with a hot cup of tea in an early morning. Wake me up, it’s ok I don’t mind, I wouldn’t mind a fictional cup of tea too. Listen, you can do anything you want in there and I won’t sulk or resent you, free yourself. You’d think by freeing you inside of me that I’m, on the contrary, caging you, but have you ever thought about that when you visualized or fantasized about a fictional character too? No.

Walk me outside and let the fresh air of 5 A.M smoothly waken every feeling I can only get in early mornings, like serenity and purity and soul-repose and the calmness within. Take me down the stairs gently and hold my hand through the sunlight, don’t let me walk with morning shadows for I wouldn’t know who to walk with at night time. Now breathe in me and give me time to breathe you out so we can no longer know who’s fictional and who’s real. I bet you won’t want to be real again and I won’t want not to be fictional the next moment you breathe me out. Talk to me about the most ridiculous things ever, believe me in novels they are always beautiful than how they really are in real life; everything always seems more dazzling in books than in the verbal words of our life. You’ll see me laughing like those lonesome people you see down the streets- but it’s ok, people no longer think insanity is actually not being sane, it’s like digging your soul out, one true and real feeling inside of you, out of the few left.

Now sing to me, please please do, and when you start never stop, keep your voice the background in the beautiful empty streets we’ll pass by, let us not just be random passers-by, let us linger like deep people do. Let me also take you near the beaches of people’s memories and soul-purging, will you cast some spell so that the ocean never ceases to send its memories to people’s hearts, so that even the night won’t leave the loved and the loner scared of the abysmal darkness?

Will you free your soul each time you felt caged in reality, and transform yourself again in someone else’s thoughts, but never stop to enjoy being fictional in someone’s core? Will you never give up on the beauty of being unreal, of being fictional whenever you needed to?

Will you be my real fictional character forever?

1:32 AM 16th march 2013.

You looked at me as if contemplating a godly creature you did not seem to fathom. I held still so you wouldn’t notice the insecurity pushed into my heart and out. I closed my eyes.
“Tell me  about a dream” –you crushed the silence.
“What? What dream? Why?"
I couldn’t understand you.
“Well, let me explain; Some dreams stay at the back of your mind for days, and each time they rush back again, it’s like you want to take hold of them and go back to sleep to complete that moment vanished by wakefulness”.
“I guess I just enjoy exploring my dreams a little while after waking up and then things run back to reality”.
“you’re wrong!” –you suddenly said, and it felt like you were trying to save me from insanity.
“You don’t enjoy because you like it, matter of fact 90% of your dreams disappear from your mind ten minutes after you wake up”.
You stuck me as quite persuasive so I nodded.
“Ah-huh”.
“Well then?”
Your facial expression. Something between a smile and seriousness, or maybe there really was a thing called a serious smile? I made that move again; I shut my eyes, yet this time I let myself think for you. I could’ve just told you, you know, the truth. Could’ve just expressed my fear towards that. Or maybe I feared you’d ask the why as well. And I didn’t want that to start.
I held my breath for a moment, sighed and let words guide – to where? I had no idea.
“It was really dark, in the dream, I mean. Fear was ocean-deep. And I was actually floating in an ocean. I was floating and drowning at the same time. I didn’t want anything more than leaving the abysmal water underneath my feet. Every time I remember the dream. I drown, once again”.
Right then, you let the air stand between us like a carrier of silence, and many other things in between. A moment of nothingness was our passerby. But I was drowning in everything. Not just a dream.
“So?” –You said.
“I’m losing air underneath again”.
“See? That’s exactly my point. Somehow, in dreams, emotions are tripled. It feels like reality struck us with too many things that everything, every emotion, surrendered to repetitiveness, lost its true essence. In dreams, though, you feel like living things for the first time, every night. Whether the moon was full or half lit.”
A pause.
“I know. I know that you think of dreams sometimes so much that you don’t know whether the next thought would come from reality or would be just another shadow of dreams. Your life seems to be like a mirage. But…”
I think I let you talk a while afterwards. But me, I only looked at you as if I’m seeing your words to save in my memory. I was like some enticed lover whose words were taken out from their heart to reach the world. You. You understood my “why”.
Then I closed my eyes once again, and let you talk.