Sometimes, when you stay up far too late into the night, just before the dawn eases itself through your window, you hear something not unlike music radiate through the walls of your room. It goes something like this:

You hear the soft murmurs compelling you to do... What? You stretch an ear, trying to comprehend it, but it remains just out of grasp. It starts slow, deliberate, strings plucked, chords struck. You find yourself, though curious, oddly at peace.

You wonder what you are supposed to hear, what is being said in wisps and whispers. It swells; it ebbs. You unconsciously begin following the pattern with your fingers, marking the beat onto the parchment of your flesh, maybe you will remember it that way, once light and clarity and reason catch up to the fleeing night. But you know that you will not, that this is a dream, that it does not want to be remembered; but then, what? Why?

You picture your thoughts so intensely, willing an answer to come with all the might you can muster, that it's as if they hover in the air, as if they are things you can see, touch, smell, hold, hear, clutch, taste, suffocate--and the music picks them up and quenches their flame, turns them to smoke, unimportant, irrelevant, inexistant. It continues and now rises, rises and consumes any thoughts you have left, a fire to the forest of your mind.

Now you see that you are empty, a husk, a vessel that has refused to carry its charge.

But you do not stay so for long. The sound drops with the gentle violence of a pin hitting the ground as you overpower it, matching it with the cry of your anguish, of the needlejabs you feel out of a need to feel--your pain from the void inside you also serving to fill it.

The music is clear to you now. You listen to it rather than hear it, you can see it in your head, you can picture it on your skin, sheet-tone flesh music. And you understand it now, you understand what is being said, you understand what you are being told.

And you remember that this is a dream, that hasn't changed, this is still a dream--you will forget it when you wake, you will not feel it any more. You will not feel once more.

So the music jumps, glides, soars--and you hear none of it, because you see now that you are settled, an unmarked slab of dried concrete, a neuron aged far beyond its childhood flexibility. You are hardened, calcified. You will not feel, not now, not ever. And you know this because you know you have dreamt this dream before. And despite the emptiness, you have not changed. You do not change. You will not change.

This, you know.

Yet the ghosts of what could have been will never rest in peace.