The soft white lights shown bright in my bedroom. My bedroom at school that is. The four tiny walls embracing me and showing me that I didn’t need anything else. This could be my home. I lay basking in the fluorescent lights and smiling to myself as they sang to me their songs of buzzing electricity. This felt comforting.

Everything was fuzzy from the edges of the room, to the hair on my head, to lights above. All was soft and happy.

This was home.

Then a knocking sound was coming from the opposite corner. I looked and saw my faucet shaking and quivering. Suddenly, the darkness was flooding in from the spout. Colors of black and blue exhaled from the chrome and threw themselves against the walls. I felt my heartbeat pick up and I heard my breath hitch. Slowly the colors ran themselves down my walls. Dripping and melting into a picture I couldn’t make out yet. They covered the softness and the white and even the lights above were slowly diming out, leaving me alone.

The picture was clearer and clearer around me until I could make it out. I was my bedroom, at my parent’s house. And I was awake. I was alive.

I clenched my chest with one hand and my sheets with the other. I was in a panic. I got up from my bed and ran over to my bathroom, running the real faucet and splashing the cool water over my face. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I went back to my room and looked at the clock. It was four in the morning. I was up. I wasn’t going to go back to bed. I wasn’t gonna go back to Reynard’s no matter how comfortable it was to dream there. It would only be a matter of time until the bad dreams started coming back. And I refused to let them get me again.