An outcome you want to avoid.

I woke up with a smile this morning.

Not that it's uncommon for me to do so, but... Given the subject manner of my recent recurrent night terrors, I suppose I should be alarmed I'm not waking up a screaming, sobbing mess. Last night I had my very first dream about him (and I'm certain there will be others in the days to come), and it was surprisingly mellow when one considers the star is what many have argued to be the very manifestation of a person's most primal of fears: Fear of the Unknown.

There's a time when you realize that you're dreaming, in the waking moments between unconsciousness and the stirring of self-awareness. I don't have those moments very often, not until I awake to find myself wondering if I had actually been dreaming, or if I was looking at a memory warped in the ways photographs tend to curl in on themselves when left in the sun. It was dark, grainy like a film noir, and I watched with the keen awareness of one out of their body as my bedroom door creaked soundlessly open; decrepit, tall body sliding in the low arch and gliding across the floor like a hull cutting through water.


He called out to me, I fancy, the soundless quality in His voice impossible in its contradictions as I watched Him hover over my sleeping form, inky tendrils caressing the side of my face much like a great Savannah cat paws at its prey. Only this was no cat but something that seemed to only very faintly pass as a man, and as I watched in rapt fascination and muted horror He stops, pausing and turning to face me, blank head tilted over His shoulder, and I know He's smiling. He's fucking smiling at me, and there's no veil in between us and I'm there, in the body that's on the bed, the abomination we call the Slender Man considering my fear for a moment before He leans forward, His Darkness devouring everything.


It's a painful feeling, like drowning outside of water.


And that's when I wake up, and I look into the mirror and catch myself smiling.
Lovely.