Halfway Between

Next Saturday is my nana's birthday, and my mum asked me to write something for her. This is what I came up with.

The place I’m going to tell you about is hardly even real, but it exists alright. It’s the land between sleeping and waking, between life and death, between night and dawn. Sometimes, you might just glimpse it, when your eyes are half closed, or when the first rays of sunlight filter through the cracks in your curtains, but you never really see it fully. It's the place you go when you're still half dreaming; the things that live there are the figures you see out of the corner of your eye, when you tell yourself you’re being silly, nothing's really there, but they are there, they are real.

It’s a dangerous world, if you don’t know how to navigate it. The creatures that lurk will taunt you, mock you until you give up and crack. Time doesn’t work there, the seconds, minutes, hours melt into each other and twist into a spiral, so you don’t know how long you’ve been there. The things that live there- nameless, faceless- trap you, they won’t let you out unless you can figure out how they work. I could tell you the answer, if you’d like, it’s not as hard as it sounds. But I’ll save that for later.

That world was created by accident. A semi-real place, one dimensional but as full and vast as any, that you can’t even see, let alone visit… consciously. It was never meant to happen. Something went wrong. And now it can’t be undone.

It isn’t entirely bad, of course. The creatures don’t mean any harm, they’re just a little…afraid. Confused. If you can get them to let you out, then you have the option to stay, and then the taunts will stop and they’ll show you things- your dreams that you never realised, the way out of your nightmares, the parts of your mind that you never knew you had. Then, you can thank them and be on your way. Though, you’ll have to do it all again the next time. Once you leave, it’s locked again, and you’ve forgotten almost everything…just a few whispers remain…but you’ll always know you’ve been.

Maybe I won’t tell you the secret, how to get them to let you out. Maybe it only works if you figure it out yourself. Maybe it’s best that way.