Erin
~Freeze~
I lie awake and dream of snow.
Cool, sharp, a dream of sparkles in the night sky. It's almost always night when I think of it falling, with no sunlight to cut the chill in the air. Nearly every night for two months I have dreamed this way, eyes open, unseeing, turned inside myself to a vista of open sky and white space. I won't program the holodeck to snow, not yet at least. It would be like cheating, and I have never been a cheater. I wonder why my thoughts of snow don't follow me into my sleeping dreams, but they never do. Or I don't think they do. I don't know what I dream anymore, really, but I imagine I dream from the moment my eyes close till the moment I'm awakened. Otherwise I'd be even more of a bear than I already am, but I don't think anyone has noticed the circles beneath my eyes very much. I am good at disguising them. I hope.
Many times I dream I am with Phoebe, and we are strolling though our neighborhood, if you could call it that. There are miles between most homes, ours included, and although the land doesn't stretch as far as it used to, it does the trick. We climb a tree, and she huddles against me on a low limb as we watch our frozen breaths mingle into one. Our hearts beat in tandem and she shoves her hands in my sleeves for warmth; she hates wearing gloves, even in freezing temperatures. Hands and fingers exactly the same size as mine grip my wrists, rub my forearms, scratch fingernails inside my elbows to try to get me to laugh. I giggle, and sometimes I fall out of the tree and drag Phoebe with me, and I push snow in her face as she screams bloody murder. These dreams are from my memory, compiled from every winter I ever spent in Indiana. Most of those years my sister and I were at each other's throats, but the last ten or so we were closer than I ever hoped we would be.
Phoebe and I once tried to convince Tuvok that it is possible to smell an imminent snowfall. We saw the cloudburst coming, and we could sense the change in the air. That crispness only barely detectable, the breeze that sang in our noses, it could mean only one thing. It was coming, and it would be a generous fall.
He didn't believe us.
"My Vulcan senses, " he stated with an air of innate superiority, "would detect this 'scent' you so describe. I smell nothing unusual, and there was no warning in the weather reports this afternoon that called for snowfall." Phoebe eyed me with her achingly familiar gaze, and I tell you I heard the unspoken words travel from her brain to mine with no effort at all: *We'll see.* My sister and I were in communion at that moment, and I felt our bond so strongly it gripped my heart. I could practically hear my blood running through her veins, and our smiles mirrored one another as we turned back inside the house.
Two hours later it started, and it didn't stop until nearly two feet fell on our land. Tuvok didn't say a word, but later I caught him sniffing the air, searching for the barely discernable scent. He didn't know then, he still doesn't, how we could smell the snow. But he doesn't understand we were born knowing, and I almost pity him that he will never learn.
When I dream of snow on these nights, it is a comfort as well as a painful reminder of what I don't have. But then I can hear Phoebe's warm breath in my ear, feel her hand in mine, and the rhythm of her heart lulls me to sleep finally, and I awaken feeling calm, and refreshed, and inexplicably happy.
I wish that could happen all the time.
Some nights I am in ice. There is snow, but it's mostly ice. I am standing still, in front of an invisible wreckage, eyes drawn to a great chasm in what looks to be a frozen sea. I am suspended on an ice floe as I slowly begin to sink. Second by second I sink, unheeding, into the freeze, and I lose sensation in my feet, my legs. I sink deeper and deeper, the ice surrounding me, and I do nothing at all to stop it. Snow falls then, halfway down, and it gathers on my eyelashes, settles on my shoulders, and I begin to blend in with the ice. I am frozen then, and still I sink, until my head is submerged, ice in my ears and eyes and nose and I stop breathing and my heart slows and time stops.
That's only happened twice. But another dream I have is similar. I am lying in snow, listening for the cry of a creature long dead, but during these nights there is no cry, and I am cold, colder than I have been in twenty endless years. Snow falls gently, pulling me into an abyss of nothing, and I welcome the heat that crawls over my face once my skin stops stinging. After a while I am covered, and the weight of the blanket grows heavier, and by then I am warm, burning, and I feel nothing else but the heat my body is trying to generate. Only the quiet seeps into my skull, and I listen still for the whimpers that will never come to rescue me from the abyss.
I sleep then. And when the alarm wakes me, I am always groggy and sick to my stomach because I have slept less than an hour. Mornings after these nights I will spend in my ready room, fighting nausea, hoping for solitude. But without fail, Chakotay finds reasons enough to ring the chime, enter my haven, break down my walls, draw me out of myself and into him. Usually by afternoon I am better, for he has force fed me breakfast which he conveniently calls brunch, since we are usually well into the shift by the time I consent to eat anything. He watches me sip my juice, gauging my reaction, listening for me to swallow, all to convince himself that I am not pouring the liquid out into the small flower vase on my desk.
He is suspicious of me those days, and for the first minute I hate him for the concern he wears so plainly across his brow. I swear he has bugged my quarters, recorded my nocturnal motions, and imagine he has raw data proving I have not slept. But I smile, and he smiles back, and we continue as we always have.
After that first minute I am grateful he is present. He would cry for me if I ever teetered on the edge of the abyss, and his voice would be the one to call me back. I would go to him if called me. Really.
But most often, I dream of snow falling right on me in my bed, cold seeping around the window panes into these quarters that have almost never been anything other than 20 degrees Celcius. The snow blends all I have ever known, every home I could ever want, because while I yearn so much to see real, true, earth snow again, I know it will bring an end to this adventure that has ruled my life for five years. I want to see snow so badly that I wish somehow a giant, heavy grey cloud would simply form right above me in my bed and release its burden upon this pillow, these sheets, this body that has gone without for so long. I would be full then, if only for a moment, and I would sleep, and I would dream.
~end
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