Dreaming.

My body seems foreign to me. My mind seems almost a separate entity. I watch my fingers typing and for a split second, my bony wrists look like someone else's. Did my arms always look like this?

I lie in bed, reading a novel when I should be reading a textbook. I read to get away from my own relentless thinking. My mind is driving me insane. Even as I close my eyes to dream, all I see is a never-ending collage of memories, mixed in with the sort of nonesense that only the dream world is capable of.

I see a girl, walking through a large marble mansion. Everywhere she turns she sees large empty rooms, rooms that were once filled with people... rooms that she had spent countless nights in as a child. I hear the faint laughter of children. I see them in the background, ghosts of the past, jumping up and down on mattresses, laughing for no reason; laughing for the sake of laughter.

Then the girl runs out of the mansion. She seems overwhelmed. She runs through the empty courtyard, passes the dead circular garden. Now she's standing atop a green field. The scene reminds her of her childhood. It reminds her of a time when she carelessly laid herself down and rolled down those hills... leaving herself at the mercy of gravity. She remembers rolling down those grassy hills, the same hills that stained her clothes green, she remembers the parents that scolded for her it, she remembers.....

And then suddenly, she bursts into tears. I watch her from atop. I watch her like someone watches a movie. I watch her and somehow feel all her grief, feel all her nostalgia, feel all her pain.

That is what I want to escape. That constantly running mind. The constantly running subconscious machine. I just want things to be calm, silent. I just want it to stop.