The moon is chasing me.

I know because I look up and I see it in the sky each night. It moves across the sea of stars, watching me. Always watching me. The nights are silent but I listen hard. I try to hear it whispering in its soft, luminous tongue, but I never hear it. The moon is very careful. Very patient. I wait for the day it will make a mistake and speak to me and sing me lullabies of the dust and the icy winds of space. Then I’ll hear it and then everyone will know that I’m not crazy and the moon is chasing me.

I stand outside and whistle with the wind. I wait for a reply that never comes. The sun is setting and the clouds are red. The moon will float above the horizon soon. I turn and scuttle to the safety of my room. I close the door and lock the window. Shut the curtains. Turn off the light. Shhh. I must be quiet now. I once wondered if the moon could see through walls, but I didn’t like the thought so I stopped thinking it.

It’s 2am. I’m curled into a sleepless ball inside a nest of soft protection on the bed. The clock is ticking on the wall. Endlessly. Eternally. I move a little and the covers slip. I wonder when I’ll get the chance to dream, and if the moon will shine inside my head. I hear the sound of raindrops on the glass. The pitter patter softness step of fairies. It’s time to check.

I crawl over the covers in the cold and find the end of the bed. The window stretches up and down and left and right. It’s covered by the curtains: black and thick. I grip the very edge, right by the wall and bring my eye so close my lashes gently brush against the fabric. I twitch my fingers and take a breath. I slowly move the safety of the curtain back, until I see the street, the houses, cars parked on the road. I lift my head and gaze in fascinated terror at the sky. The stars are gone; the big black clouds have eaten them alive. They burn inside the stomachs of the beasts. That must be why they’re crying, sending rivulets of tears to trickle down my window and to soak the grass and make the flowers grow.

I do not have a problem with the clouds. Sometimes they’re here, sometimes they go away. I don’t know where. Sometimes there’s many gathered in the sky. I think they must be party folk who dance together all night long in drunken ecstasy to forget the pain of stars still brightly burning in their bellies. But they don’t eat the moon. It hides behind them, skulking. I search the sky for it, but not a hint of moonlight can be seen. It knows I’m looking. I don’t know if the times when clouds obscure the sky are safe and if the moon is blinded by the clouds. I hope that’s true. In my deepest, happy daydreams, I imagine that the moon can’t see me through the parties that the clouds hold in the sky. I sigh in bliss. But then the other argument pulls at my mind and happy thoughts disperse. Maybe the moon grew frustrated because it couldn’t see me. Perhaps it made itself a silver rope and climbed its way down down down to the Earth.

I spasm as a violent shiver wracks my form. I slam the curtain shut. The bad thoughts mock me from inside my head. They whisper terrifying things. I hear them say that the moon is walking up the street, climbing over the high, high walls and standing on the lawn. I feel its gaze fixated on my window and I hear a high, quiet keening like an injured animal. I realise it is me. I do not stop. I need to hide.

I climb out of my bed and crouch down on the floor. The bad thoughts say ‘it can see through your walls’ but I ignore them. I reach under my bed. I pull out all the boxes and the dusty board games that I never play, the packages I’ve never opened. I put it all into a pile and lie flat on my stomach on the carpet. Slowly, but as fast as I can manage, I pull myself sideways so that I am hidden under the bed. Relief floods through me as I reach out and pull the pile towards me to hide me even more. Aha! I’ve fooled the moon. The bad thoughts are impressed, they say ‘although it can see through your walls, it cannot see under the bed.’

Now I can dream. I smile at this because I know that in my dreams the moon does not exist.

***

It’s morning. I am cramped and my left arm is numb. The imprint of the carpet has left red painful marks on all the skin that it could reach. But I don’t care. I dreamt that I was standing in the street at midnight. I stared up at the sky and it was only the stars that stared back down at me. The moon was dead. I laughed and laughed until the sun had risen and I woke. I barely notice my muscles scream in pain as I scramble awkwardly from beneath the bed.

It’s a crisp new winter day. I pull the curtains wide. The clouds have gone to bed and the sun is low and shining weakly in the sky. Sometime in the night the rain had frozen into snow. I smile and open up the window and lean out to breathe the freshness of the air into my lungs. The cold clings to me and I feel its fingers on my face. My breath forms clouds of crystals in the air. It’s magic, but without the black top hat or rabbits.

I’m happy today, so I go into the garden when I’m dressed up warm. I lie down in the snow and it soaks into my hair and through my gloves. I take them off and watch contentedly as my fingers turn red with cold. I smile and carve my name into the snow. My nose is numb. I’m still so tired that I fall asleep and dream again.

***

My eyes won’t open when I first attempt to wake. I try to move my arms to wipe away the frost, but I can’t feel my hands. I turn my head this way and that. I hear footsteps crunching in the snow. A shout. Someone’s touching me and making noises, forming words, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. Now hands are lifting me, and I manage to prise my eyelids open and all I see is sky. I choke and try to run, but they hold my legs. I see it! I see it in the sky! The moon has chased me into daylight! I scream long after the roof appears above my head. I scream until the darkness shuts my mouth.

***

I wake up thinking ‘this is the third time I have woken up today.’ It’s funny because sometimes I don’t even wake up once if I haven’t slept the night before. Sometimes I forget to sleep because I’m too busy listening for the moon and then I’m sad for the rest of the day because I didn’t get the chance to dream. It makes me sad now to think about it.

And then I wake up properly and remember. I saw the moon that mocked me from the sky. I make the same high keening sound of terror as last night. I look around the room and see the window open. The moon hangs in the sky. I lurch to the end of the bed and pull the curtains shut with fumbling fingers that are barely under my control. I start to sob. The tears warm my face and remind me of the rain and then the snow. I check to see if they are freezing on my face, but they are not. I wipe my eyes, but they don’t get any drier. I sit and clumsily clench my fists in despair. I don’t feel well.

Sometimes I think I have it wrong. I think that maybe this is all the dream and when I close my eyes in bed, I’m waking up in reality. I think about this now. I long for this to be the truth so much, hunger for it so that my mouth waters and drool spills down my chin. I wish that I could stay awake inside the dreams that I hope are not just dreams. I’ve heard that there’s a way. Sometimes people disappear and never come back. I’ve seen it happen. It scared me because no one could tell me where they’d gone. They said ‘they’ve gone’ and I said ‘where?’ and they just looked at me and shook their heads and never replied. Until one day.

One day, I asked a woman who I’d never seen before ‘where did Mary go?’ I liked Mary. No one would tell me where she went. The woman took my hand and squeezed it gently and she said to me ‘Mary’s gone to a better place. She’s going to be happy now.’ And that made me happy too, but I forgot to ask her where the better place was and how to get there. I never saw the woman again, so I never got to ask her.

I think of Mary now. She didn’t believe me when I told her that the moon was chasing me, but that was OK because nobody believes me. But she was nice to me and didn’t call me crazy, so I liked her. The last time I spoke to her before she left she’d told me that she felt like somebody was grabbing her insides and ripping them out to leave an empty space. I said that she should run away from the person who was doing that to her. She looked at me for a long time and then she smiled and told me that it was a very good idea. That was the only time I saw her smile.

I surface from my thoughts and look around, surprised. While I was remembering Mary, I had walked out of my room and through the corridors. Now I’m climbing up the stairs. I wonder where I’m going. I don’t know, so I keep on climbing. Up and up and up, until I reach a door. I open it and step out onto the roof. I freeze and feel my neck go stiff as I try to look up at the sky and stop myself at the same time. I stand there in the doorway for a very long time.

‘This is where Mary went away,’ the bad thoughts whisper in the silence. I turn my head, stiffly. I look around. I can’t see anywhere to go. There’s railings built around the edges of the roof where people lean against them when they smoke. I run and reach the edge and cling to them crouch down on the floor, as if they could somehow shelter me from the gaze of the moon that I can feel but don’t dare look at.

I stop myself from looking up by looking down.

“Mary!” I call. “Mary! Mary!”

I listen hard in the silence, but it isn’t Mary who I hear. I shake in horror as I hear the moon. It sings to me in words that I can’t understand, soft and whispery, a song inside a susurrus. I bang my head against the railings to try and block out the sound. Harder. HARDER.

I hear her calling.

I look down, and Mary’s standing on the ground. She calls my name again and beckons me. She’s laughing and she’s dancing in her better place.

“You’re dreaming,” she shouts up to me. “You’re stuck in a dream, silly. There’s no such thing as a moon! That’s just silly!” And she laughs and laughs.

I scramble up and look desperately at the railings. They’re almost as tall as me, made of wires. I make the mistake of looking up and see the moon. It’s getting closer. It’s going to end the chase. It’s going to catch me unless I act quickly and wake up. I reach up to the top of the railings and I jump and pull myself and fling my leg up. It catches on the criss-crossed wires. I pull myself, panting, trying to gain some purchase with my other leg. The moon is reaching out for me from above, while Mary reaches up to me from below. Success! I’m balanced, clinging with fingers and toes on top of the railing. I feel the fear leave me. I know that I can make it. I shift my weight and feel the world falling around me.

I hope that this will wake me up. I’m sick of dreaming that the moon is chasing me.