When Will I Wake Up

İpek Nil Sancak

A car ride at night. There is music playing in the background at perfect volume; it doesn’t disrupt the scenarios going on in my head. Though the lyrics are biting and leaving claw marks all over my mind, I can’t seem to remember what I was imagining in the first place. My mind is now only thinking about things that it shouldn’t. How will my life end? When? Isn’t this enough? Will it ever be enough? I want to stop thinking. The easiest way to do that is to fall asleep. That’s what I do every time. But, if I continue doing that, I will never completely heal. I should be able to think about stressful things and not completely shut down. My stupid brain just can’t stop thinking. But if I stop now, then I can’t become the person I think about all the time. Is this all I will ever be? All I want to do is scream. “Mommy, am I too old to dream? I can still imagine, right..?” She answers but I can’t quite understand her. “Mommy I can’t hear you!” That's when I realize that she is slowly disappearing. “Mommy, where are you going? Don’t leave me, please!” I try to scream, but something, someone is holding me. My desperate screams come out as a desperate tear. The car is parked now and he is holding me. Telling me that it’s going to be okay. But it won’t, we aren’t driving anymore. Were we ever driving? “Daddy, where are we?” “Oh no” he answers “She’s having another one.” It seems like he isn’t talking to me and then I feel the presence of another body. I turn around to see a woman sitting in the backseat. How did she get there? But she seems familiar anyway. “Hey honey I’m here to help you!” she says, trying to disguise her loss of patience in a smile and a whisper. How quickly she says those words, almost as if they are meaningless, never stops to surprise me, not even after all this time. “Can I see my mom first?” I try not to be hopeful, I already know her answer. “Darling she’s not here.” she says cautiously, almost as if she’s afraid of me. I want to ask “how” or “why” or anything else, anything that will get me an answer. But I don’t. I know that she’ll tell me the same things she always says. I don’t want to keep hearing those words so instead I say “I know.” I should be crying but the whole thing doesn’t seem quite real. What even is real? If this moment right now is real then what about the car? The car was pretty real. I was happy in the car but I’m not happy here. Or maybe I was not. Was I ever happy? No, I'm pretty sure I was happy in the car. I mean why wouldn’t I be? Why wouldn’t I be? A pragmatic approach would be to say that the car was real and this is not. I think that I’m going to be a pragmatist now. However, the woman screaming in my face says otherwise. I know that she’s screaming from her expressions, but her words are coming out muffled. I try touching the things around me; that’s what they do in the movies. I can feel my hair. It’s soft, too soft even. I want to play while being delicate with it, but I also want to rip it all out and just watch. I never know how to act around things that are delicate. Maybe that is why I destroy so many things I love. My touch is deadly, my entire being is a sin. Well, when I think about it now, I’m not that religious. Maybe that is why all of this is happening. That is when the strange stinging starts. My head immediately turns in my left arm’s direction. I see the woman backing away. “Where are you going?” She doesn’t answer. “What did you do to me?” I say now with a louder volume. Then I start feeling sleepy again. No, I shouldn’t fall asleep, I should face my thoughts. But it gets harder to keep my eyes open with the passing of each second. I want to sleep. I need to sleep. I can almost see my mom reaching out to me. I can hear her now. “Come to me, come to Mama.” she says. I try hugging her but it’s empty. I can't touch her, not yet. Can I talk to her at least? “Mommy!” I say, feeling that if I don’t speak fast and loud enough she’ll disappear again. She smiles and says “You’ll see me again when you dream and I’ll explain everything.” But how will I know if I’m dreaming or not? I see you now, does that mean that this is a dream? But then again I see you all the time, am I always dreaming? I try all of my best tricks to win the great war with the ruler of dreams, but it’s meaningless. I accept my defeat and close my eyes. I only have one question in my mind now and nothing else. It’s like my mind is empty, this rarely happens. Is it really empty? Am I finally free? I wait for a moment to see if the rush of thoughts will come back to haunt me or not. Instead of a flood, a single wave is coming towards me. And maybe that single question left is enough to keep me busy for days, weeks and the rest of my life. In the end, all of the deadly tsunamis start out as a single wave. My mind is almost gone now and it wonders, maybe for the last time. Or maybe for the first time, it’s hard to tell. When will I truly wake up?