The Night of the Winter Solstice 2012

It was 12/21/12 the day the Mayans predicted the world would end.

I’d had night terrors before, but this one I still don’t comprehend.

I met a man in the dinner car of a train.

He told me he loved me, and his expression was strained.

He asked me to jump with him and leave the life I knew behind.

I replied, “No. I’m finally settled, happily married now,” a polite decline.

There was a look of sadness and hurt, written across his face,

Then my adrenaline peaked. I knew something was out of place.

I argued that I didn’t know him and that this couldn’t be real,

He begged me to remember him with a sadness in his eyes he couldn’t conceal.

I looked around the room and knew things weren’t at the surface what they seem,

He replied, “Darling, you know this is much more than just a dream.”

When I refused his advance he told me to leave,

Then what happened next, I couldn’t believe.

I stood from our table where he sat sipping tea,

Just to get shot in my calf, beneath the inside of my right knee.

I fell out of my bed screaming and writhing in pain,

Awaking unsure of my reality, feeling insane.

I was alone, laying on the floor of my apartment,

Leaving behind the man on the train, in the dinner car compartment.

More than a decade later and I still wonder what it all ment,

Are dreams manifestations of traumas that we’ve yet to relent?

Do I live one life by day and another by night?

Is my perception of what’s real, even right?

It’s rare to have an experience that causes you to question reality,

And even more so to question your own mortality.

I know if I start talking about alternate realities and parallel planes of existence,

I’ll leave my sanity behind and be met with resistance,

From the establishment who dictates to us “what’s normal” and realistic

Without considering that reality maybe entirely individualistic.