I. Strangulation

I was dreaming again.

As I woke up I inhaled as if I hadn't taken a single breath the whole night. As if I'd been drowning, my lungs felt like they were coated in salt. I must be dehydrated, I thought. My mouth was completely dry on the inside. I could barely slip a cigarette between my parched lips. But when I did, I began to cough violently after a couple of puffs. Not one of my brightest ideas. I clipped it on my worn bedpost and tossed it on my sidetable. As I gathered up the willpower to carry myself to the bathroom, I realized I must be dying. In a technical sense, of course, everyone would be dying, but I felt as if Death were keeping tabs on me, anticipating the one day where everything inevitably caught up with me. These days I was thinking of analogies for everything. The bed was my funeral pyre, the bottle would be my urn, my lighter the creamatory device, and the contents of my lifestyle -- clothes half as old as me, CDs no one listened to anymore, the contents of my clever cannabis-leaf-shaped ashtray -- were the wood that fueled the fire.

Staring back at me in the dim mirror of my washroom was the portrait of a man. I looked more like the monster of a Hieronymous Bosch painting than I did the centerpiece of a work of art by, say, Raphael. But it had been a long time since I had studied art history. One thing I failed to learn in college was how useless most of the courses you take will turn out to be. Another thing they failed to mention was how the appeal of the word "freelance" would deteriorate with age. So here I am, a 40-something-year-old divorced male whose face was sinking into his skull as he contemplated excessively.But today, it wasn't my obvious failures or facial flaws that kept my attention. Infesting the centre of my chest was a large bruise, as if someone had been bludgeoning me in my sleep in that same spot. My skin was beginning to crack in that area, leaving a map of blood -- highways and sidestreets of that peculiar shade of red -- transversing outward from the heart of the city that was my own heart. After fishing through my drawers for some bandages and wrapping myself up poorly, I checked the locks on my doors three times and left my small apartment, a modest little fixture somewhere deep within one of the less-picturesque sections of Cologne, Germany.

I arrived at the docks that overlooked the Rhine. Purposeful industrial ships and sailboats at leisure drifted by every now and then, while the boats tied to the dock rocked back and forth uneasily. The wind was blowing in the opposite direction of the current. Not even the wind can control the water, I thought with horror. I was still afraid of drowning back then, back before I knew what other terrors existed in this world.

The sun hurt my eyes. Staring into its reflection in the river, as it left tracks of glitter around its likeness, hurt more. I looked away when I felt I'd become ill if I looked any longer, but I couldn't help but return my gaze once the feeling had past. I don't think I'd ever seen anything so beautiful it hurt to look at it. I thought back to the wife I had divorced many years ago. In the conventional sense, she wasn't outstanding in any way. But for the ten or so years we were together, she had been my sun -- something I truly needed. No, I'm making everything sound rosier than it was. We were divorced for a reason. Reason being she loved a great number of things more than she did me, and I didn't have the means to pay for all of it.

At this point, I'd become afraid of the next night. I did everything I could to resist the allure of sleep. These attacks in the night, the shortness of breath, bruising on my chest, weren't a new thing. I'd been dealing with this crap for about six months now. I fought against my initial instinct to go to the doctor -- for one, I didn't have health insurance. Also, I doubt a doctor could enlighten me at all on how I got my injuries. Maybe it was just fear that I'd be diagnosed with something horrible for all my bad living habits, or he'd just perscribe me something I wouldn't bother taking anyway.

Only when the sun was setting, casting a somewhat ominous glimmer against the still waters of the canal, did I decide to return home. I didn't bother picking up anything to eat on the way home, fearing a bout of nausea if my nightly tormentor should revisit me.

When I did finally lie down to sleep, when my tiredness was about to take advantage of me at last, closing my eyes was paired with a sense that I was being smothered. I knew there was nothing in front of my face, but I couldn't breathe. I couldn't bring myself fully to consciousness either. A part of me knew I was struggling in the real world, even if I was technically asleep. A lucid dream is what some people may call it. Though I knew fully in my mind it was something more than that.