ChloeCasey Lange

(Every name, location and plot point was taken directly from a dream)

I was going to hang out with Emily today, but she had changed her name to Chloe, making things slightly more convoluted then they needed to be. She had also moved to a new apartment; The High Rise. A structure so tall it kissed the atmosphere. The elevator ride up was confusing to say the least. In order to get that high that fast required some serious g-force. The elevator had an artificial gravity device inside it, but it malfunctioned so I ended up floating in what felt like zero gravity for the ride up. Upon arriving, Chloe greeted me with a grin on her face. It had been too long. We hung out, caught up and got down. It was a very pleasant afternoon. She told me to come back the next day, witch I did. But things weren’t the way I left them. Her entire room was trashed, and Chloe huddled in the corner, just crying. I asked her what was wrong, so she handed me a sketchbook. In it were these strange drawings and Japanese symbols. I flipped through it and every so often, instead of a drawing, there was shit smeared over the page. She told me that her landlord was abusing her, and making her look at these sketches every day. And every day he would make a new one. If she refused to look at the sketch, the landlord would violently beat her and throw shit at her. With tears in her eyes she told me how she lost so much sleep because he would make her get up at strange hours, just to look at these sketches. She asked me if I wanted to go for a drive with her, to take her mind off all of this. Naturally, I agreed. We got into a Jeep and started driving. She seemed a bit out of sorts, driving as fast as the car could possibly go. I remained calm, knowing that this was just something she just needed to work out of her system. We approached a bridge, where we could either go left or right. In the middle was a concrete divider. She hadn’t turned the steering wheel yet, our course headed straight to the divider. But I remained calm. Before we crashed, she turned to me and spoke. “Remember Casey, death isn’t an illusion when you don’t want it to be.”