He shot me in the head.

I saw a flash of light but did not die.

You cannot die in a dream.

Last night was the first time in my life I had a gory dream. No, it wasn’t my first subconscious foray into nightmares, or even the first in which I should have died but woke up in the nick of time. It was the first in which I was to die a violent death. The first that I woke up remembering what I looked like with the side of my head pulverized.

In the daylight my dream, in some ways, seems comical. In other ways it frightens me even more. As the second person lined their weapon up to my head I remember trying to go to a happy place so I wouldn’t know what they were doing. I didn’t want to feel them move, or hear the mechanism of the gun chambering a round.

In my mind I focused on hearing a friend’s voice calling a nickname given to me by my mother.

Emilina Carolina.

The gun did not go off.

There is more to the dream, like my begging for another angle to preserve my eyesight if I lived through another bullet to my brain. “I wouldn’t be able to handle not seeing,” I calmly explained.

The ending to this post is as in my dream. Abrupt.