{ if you hold my hand and take me where you go i'll show you the side that no one knows

She is born between spring and summer. It is not to bloody screams of agony and harried breaths panting doggedly at her. She is born through the door to nowhere into calm cerulean waters, to a distorted sky that she cannot see clearly and the underside of lilypads. Their fragile stems snake between her fingers to the bottom of the lake, but she cannot see where they end.

She is born with nothing but the whispers of multiple voices enveloping her, voices that speak of wisdom and knowledge, of despair and pain and of hope and joy. They tell her of the only thing that she will be sure of for the rest of her life:

“Your name is Krystal.”

Krystal.

Krystal phases through dreams as casually as switching carriages on a moving train. She sits down beside a young boy and smiles at him as he clutches a cardboard robot to his chest. He asks her a question and she speaks normally to him as if he were someone she saw every day. The next minute she has moved on to another dream. It doesn’t really matter. The dreamer would only remember snatches of this in the morning, she knows.

This must have been fate predestined for her from the time she came to exist in the world filled with nothing but lilypads and endless blue sky.

Krystal has had plenty of time to think about her earliest memory in the forever that she has been drifting through the dreamscape. It might have been yesterday; it might have been a thousand years ago. None of it really matters to Krystal apart from two questions:

“Who am I? Why am I here?”

She drifts into an old man’s dream. He morphs into a young man before Krystal’s eyes, eyes bright with life and a bouquet of flowers in his hand. He is wearing a nice-looking suit, and she knows without asking that this is the only suit he owns. He smiles at her, and Krystal knows without looking down herself that she is in a white, lacy dress borrowed from her sister’s friend just for today. Just to get married.

Krystal knows that the old man is looking into the eyes of his dead wife and not hers.

She phases out as soon as she can. When the large golden tear drops from the corner of the man’s eye she knows that he is crying in the real world, probably into the lonely white sheets of his empty bed.

Krystal is accustomed to the solitary walks and the horrible moments of realization that she is as empty and infinite as the world she inhabits. She has experienced these moments a total of twenty times in her living memory.

This is the twenty-first time.

He is young, both in the dreamscape and the real world. His hair is messy in a non-deliberate way, as if he has just woken up and forgotten where he kept his comb. He is wearing a red plaid shirt and sitting on the bench overlooking the pond in his local park when she approaches. He jumps to his feet and smiles at her.

Krystal feels the world become a little distorted.

She shakes her head imperceptibly and smiles back, and the world straightens itself. In his eyes she is the girl that he is on a date with but has never seen in real life, perhaps the faint imprint of a stranger he had glimpsed on the street that had stayed within his subconscious. She can see herself, short hair and mischievous eyes.

“This is for you,” he smiles, and draws a small package from the pocket of his chinos. Krystal thanks him, and when he looks a little imploringly at her she steps forward and gives him a hug. This is not a first date. This is an anniversary.

They sit down on the bench and hold hands, talking idle nonsense. Krystal knows this is the hardest part of being a dreamscape being: forging relationships with strangers for a few short moments and then fading into oblivion. She has never encountered the same person twice, in the forever that she has been doing this. This young man is no exception.

Krystal feels into the pocket of her coat and finds a hand wrapped package. Taking it out, she smiles and bashfully tells him that she got something for him too. His eyes light up even more – is that even possible, she wonders – when he opens it to find a small blank notebook.

Interesting, Krystal thinks. He must be a writer.

The young man looks into her eyes and smiles again. He draws closer to her, his eyes half-closing. Krystal wants to keep her eyes open, needs to keep her eyes open, but she has to play by the rules of his world and her eyelids snap themselves shut on their own accord. His lips are warm and soft and unlike any other dream kiss she has had, and without thinking she forces herself past the rules and puts her hands into his hair. His hair is also warm and soft and there is something in his heart that is tugging hers into dangerous territory. And that is when the moment comes and spears her through the chest with a burning ferocity.

He pulls away, and really, she should have known better than to break the rules of someone else’s world. He blinks, looking confused, and removes his hand from where it was placed on her knee. Almost immediately the world begins to bend at the seams, ripples spreading through the air behind him.

“You’re not…” he speaks the name of the girl he should be with, but the word is blurred and muffled as if he is speaking through a layer of mud. “Who are you?”

Krystal doesn’t reply as the pain burns a hole straight through her. She falls off the bench and doubles over her knees and that’s when she realizes that she can see the strands of pink waving over her shoulder. He can see her.

He can see her.

“Who… who are you?”

He bends down beside her and touches her on the shoulder and that’s when the dream melts around her in great splashes, like a waterfall that has finally run out of water and comes to an end. She’s back in her home world of lilypads and as she lies on her back in the water and stares up at the endless blue sky, she realizes that she didn’t even know his name.

“Who am I?” she asks into the clouds.

The pain glows a little brighter in her chest, then slowly ebbs away.

Krystal is between fighting for her life as a squad member of a teenage girl’s rebel group and being a y gardener for a desperate housewife when she looks up and spots him. He’s sitting on a rooftop this time, knees curled up to his chest and a faraway look in his eyes. He’s wearing the same clothes as the last time. She supposes that no one really cares how they look in their dreams anyway.

Despite the warning flutter inside her she dodges a bullet and pulls her shirt back on and walks towards his dream. She hesitates for a second, then pushes her hand through the floating sphere of pulsating dream matter and phases in. She appears right next to him. He looks up at her.

She isn’t anyone to him. She’s her.

Immediately, Krystal feels a trickle of cold water run down her spine. The world is bending at the seams again. She shakes her head and grits her teeth. The world stops trembling.

“I’ve seen you before,” he says simply, looking away again. He pats the ground beside him, and Krystal musters the courage to seat herself beside him. “I can’t remember where, but I’ve seen you before. I’m sure I have.”

Krystal is impressed. She closes her eyes and feels his subconscious press against her, breathing in deeply and soundly, memorizing everything about her from the colour of her hair to the smell of her skin. “What’s your name?” he asks. She opens his eyes and he is sitting right where he was, only his eyes are staring intently at her.

“Krystal,” she replies.

“Krystal…” he repeats. He smiles, and Krystal feels the world beginning to distort again. She clenches her fist into a shaky hold, and it rights itself. “It suits you. I’m Jongin.”

“J… Jongin?” she whispers, and he nods.

“Will I remember this when I wake up?” he asks, and Krystal freezes.

“What makes you think you’re dreaming?”

His smile is like a thousand golden suns bearing down on her, and it makes the usually beautiful light in her home world seem small and thin compared to it. She could wander through his glow forever. The thought crystallizes before she can will it away, and that’s when the world begins to trickle away at the corners.

I'm losing control, Krystal thinks desperately. And yet the pain that usually comes with losing a dream is absent.

“I know I am,” Jongin says, oblivious to the fact that he, too, is melting away. His eyes roam her face. “I’d know you if I were awake.”

The world explodes into a thousand tiny droplets, leaving Krystal alone on a lilypad gasping for air. He knows.

Krystal lets the next three hundred and twenty dreams roam around on free will, occasionally bumping into each other and other times intersecting. She doesn’t cast these a second glance. Intersecting dreams are the dreams of soul mates; where she is only allowed to observe and not interact.

She can’t stop thinking about the boy. The boy who can see her for what she really is, who knows her name. The boy who knows he’s dreaming.

Jongin.

She repeats his name quietly to herself and feels the warmth of his smile on her skin.

Jongin.

He’s waiting for her when she finds him between a bathroom filled with ghosts and flying donkeys carrying a couch.

“It’s been a while, Krystal.”

To Krystal it has been a thousand and sixty-three dreams of idle wandering, but she merely smiles and replies, “Yes, Jongin. It has.”

In the sixth dream they go for a long, long walk through a tunnel entirely surrounded by soft green foliage. Krystal has never seen such beauty in someone else’s dream before. Jongin tells her that he has never been here before, either.

“I saw pictures of it in a book and I would really love to come here one day,” he shrugs sheepishly. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Krystal agrees. She can tell where Jongin has had to make up details; she cannot tell what species of tree it is that is molded so perfectly to be the walls of tunnel, nor can she feel what the leaves are like. To Jongin they would feel like generic leaves. To her they feel like nothing.

“Don’t you ever wish you could leave this place?” Jongin asks her.

Krystal says nothing as they stroll along, hands clasped behind her back. By now he has deduced that she only exists in his dreams, and he is intelligent enough to not ask how. He has also never questioned how it is that he can remember her, but Krystal knows the answer to that.

Jongin is a dreamer.

He is not like the other dreamers who merely have dreams while they sleep – no, Jongin is a dreamer through and through. He remembers her because he remembers all his dreams, and he remembers all his dreams because they are all that he knows.

“I like my dreams more than reality, to be honest,” he shrugs when she mentions that his subconscious is astonishingly strong.

Jongin spends all his time wishing he could be in the dreamscape. Krystal spends all her time wishing he could be here too.

“What’s this?” he touches the point between where her ribcage separates. Krystal gasps as an electric bolt slams into the spot where his fingers are on her bare skin, and she pushes him away. The moment is here again.

“Krystal?” His eyes are worried.

But the dream has already come to a dry end.

Trembling, Krystal looks down herself and watches as the number 22 sears itself into her skin in an ugly brown scar. She curls up on her lilypad and weeps.

“Take me to your home world,” he begs on the tenth dream. “Take me with you.”

“I can’t,” Krystal apologizes. “You’re not a part of the dreamscape.”

He looks paler than usual, and Krystal realizes that he is a little blurred around the edges. But he doesn’t say anything and she is content to lay her head on his lap as they watch a whale fly past on its majestic migration to nowhere.

Jongin tells her he loves her in the fourteenth dream.

Krystal doesn’t see him again until she has phased through two thousand five hundred and seventy-six dreams after that.

And when she does, she wishes she had never gone looking for a second dream with him.

“What is this place?” Krystal asks when she meets him. They are standing in a dream filled with endless clear blue sky and when she looks down at her feet she finds herself standing on sky as well. She sees something else too, a nymph-like creature with bright pink wavy hair staring back at her. She looks up at Jongin.

“You’re beautiful,” he says.

She can see him clearly now. She can see the dark circles beneath his eyes, the pale greyness of his skin. She can see his heart beginning to slow down. She knows now why he loves his dreams more than his reality. She knows now why his subconscious was so great; only in his dreams is he able to travel to places that he can never go.

Jongin steps forward and she can see the ripples beneath his feet. He smiles at her, but it is not a warm, golden smile. It is a smile tinged with the sound of waves crashing on a lonely shore, and Krystal only feels a ghostly whisper were his fingers brush against her cheek.

When Jongin kisses her it feels different from when he was kissing her as someone else. He feels a little less real, a little less solid, like he is slipping away beneath her fingers. She knows now that this meeting will be their last. Somewhere in the real world, Jongin is dying.

“I love you,” Krystal whispers as a tear slips away beneath her eyelids, and she means it.

That is when the pain erupts so intensely that it forces her to pull away. Jongin begins to scream, falling to his knees, and when she tries to clutch at him he breaks away beneath her fingers. Krystal shrieks and crouches in front of him as he stretches a shaky hand towards her. As their fingers touch, Jongin crumbles away into dust.

The dream is still intact.

It is still Jongin’s dream, but Krystal is the only inhabitant here now.

He’s waiting for her between dream spheres of a bathroom filled with flying donkeys and ghosts carrying a couch. He is sitting on a lilypad, his hair wet and the water from the lake still dripping from his elbows. He is in her home world. He is smiling at her.

“It’s been a while, Krystal.”

To Krystal it has been a hundred and fifty thousand nine hundred and sixty-three dreams of idle wandering and the number seared into her chest has reached 50 but she merely smiles and replies, “Yes, Jongin. It has.”