I awake from the nightmare to find myself alone. For eternity I walk through twisted fragments of experience, each perfectly contextless and perfectly horrific, trapped in an uncaused world emanating from somewhere that always sits just out of sight. Daycares, classrooms, lecture halls, appointments, and cubicles. Perfect prisons rendered perfectly in my mind. Past and future, impotent, painted cardboard cutouts to my left and my right. Just outside someone shouts at me, they’re trying to get my attention, yelling my name over and over, but I have work to do. I close the window to drown them out. I put on headphones to drown them out. A visit to the principal’s office to drown them out. Gym and Starbucks at the office to drown them out. Seroquel to drown them out. The person outside just keeps getting louder and louder. The noise is unbearable. I can’t focus on anything. I stand up and go back towards the window to tell them to buzz off, and when I do, I look and see. The person shouting at me is me, and I am nothing. I awake from the nightmare to find myself alone. My bedroom is softly aglow in the hallow twilight of an impending morning. I don’t struggle to get out of bed like I ordinarily do. The covers are as warm as I remember them, a perfect mausoleum to never wake up from, but they have no hold over me anymore. I feel light, free like a child; somehow stepping clean out of a bath of tar. The door to my parents bedroom is set ajar, cheap late night sitcoms and blaring blue light make shadows out of the two on the walls. They’re both asleep, but I see a terrible pain on their face, tugging at them in their sleep. Perhaps the entire house was sharing a night terror. I grab my mother’s shoulder and shake her “Ay mum, mum, wake up! It’s just a nightmare!” She pushes me away and mumbles something about focus, but doesn’t open her eyes. I try with my father instead, surely he’ll wake her up if I get him up. Instead he pushes me away, much harder than she did, and I grunt as I stagger back into the wall. It will be morning soon, then they’ll wake up, won’t they? I grab a wooden chair from my room and sit in the hall. Floorboards creak as I bounce my leg up and down. A clock ticks in the distance, but that twilight that sits just before morning doesn’t lighten a smidge. I wait. I wait some more. I shake them again. I wait. I shout their names. I bounce on their bed. I slap mom and she cries in her sleep. I slap dad and he slaps me back harder. I dump a bucket of cold water on their heads and they piss themselves in their sleep and catch a cold. Something somewhere begins to dawn on me, like the growth of a seed right before it pierces the Earth and finds the open air. But I don’t know yet what. Whatever. My parents can sleep as much as they want. I leave our hallway and go to the front door. It see snow through the windows so I pull on boots and mittens and my toque, I wrap myself in a scarf and wear three layers of pants and a parka, and I open it. I can barely see my breath in the still pre-morning air. I trudge through the snow down my sidewalk and see cars littering the streets, and in each one I walk by is someone sleeping, or two people. I shout and bash on the window to no avail. Like my parents they mumble something in their rest, but their faces remained contorted in the pain of a bad dream. I wander the streets until I make my way to the downtown area. All around me I see napping people. Men in suits slumbering with their briefcase like a pillow. Women holding leashes and snoozing on a park bench while their dogs wimper at them, futilely trying to wake them. Men sleeping on their bikes, women sleeping in front of a still-pouring water fountain, a man with a knife and an officer with a taser dozing beside each other. It’s all pointless, isn’t it? Here I am all awake, and all alone. I take a deep breath, and sit down on a snowy park bench beside a sleeping couple. Perhaps it would be better to take some melatonin and go back. But as I sit there pitying myself, I begin to notice the magnificent quiescence of the moment. The sound of snowflakes twinkling as they land and their ice crystals shatter, and wind rustling the branches together like wooden wind-chimes, and birds in the distance sing of better times. And as I sit, the twilight horizon begins to melt away into a creamy orange glow, and the sun begins to rise, and casts a warm light into the frigid morning; and I realise that although I may have awoken from this nightmare alone, trapped without any other in a frigid winter, that the naked trees and hibernating flowers hidden beneath the drifts shall still yet bloom for a glorious summer. And for my frigid soul, merely to witness it is worth waking up alone.