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Still he waited.

The darkness was still there.

Something was wrong.

The woman was still standing beside him, in the void where he usually found the waking world. They should both be awake.

She turned and noticed him for the first time.

“Hello,” she said.

He watched her in the empty darkness.

“Hello,” she said again.

“Hi,” he said with a puzzled look.

They both stood in the nothingness, looking intently at each other. “That was relatively easy,” she said with relief. “I thought it would be… unpleasant.”

He regarded her with uncertainty for a long moment.

She looked at him quizzically. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Well where do we go from here?” she asked impatiently.

“I… I don’t know,” he stammered. “Wherever you would normally go, I guess.” His voice sounded strange to him. It had been so long since he had tried to speak in a dream. He had forgotten the slight echo and strange harmonization that clung to his words.

She studied him for a moment, then turned away to peer deeper into the surrounding darkness.

He also began looking around in the darkness.

She brought her attention back to him.

“You’re not here to take me, are you?” she said, crossing her arms with a disapproving look.

“Should I be?” he asked.

“Well, it doesn’t look that way.” She twisted her face into a frustrated frown. “In that case, you really shouldn’t be here, you know,” she said. “It’s not right.”

He stared at her in silence.

“How long have you been there?” she asked.

“Quite a while.”

“Well it’s time you should go.” She tried to wave him away. “Go on, it’s my time now.”

She looked around for a moment, and let out a sigh.

She looked back at him.

“Shoo!” She was waving her arms and clapping her hands wildly at him. “Go on, shoo!”

“I would if I could,” he said meekly. He looked around, trying to find something in the darkness. His eyes found their way back to the woman and rested in a level gaze upon hers.

“It’s not up to me,” he said. “I’ll leave when you wake up again.” He gave a light shrug of his shoulders.

She raised her hand to her lips and touched them slightly. “Oh my,” she said.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

She looked away from him, down at the darkness beneath her feet.

“I’m afraid so,” she said in almost a whisper. Her eyes travelled back up to his. “I don’t think I will be waking up.”

“What do you mean?”

She looked away, her eyes unable to meet his. Turning her back to him, she took a few steps into the darkness. Her head hung low as she said, “I mean I took a lot of sleeping pills and I think I’m dead.”

There was a long pause as he considered this.

“You mean on purpose?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Another pause. “Why?”

She took a deep breath and released it with a sigh.

“I wanted it to just be… over.”

She looked back up at him and he could see imagined tears welling up in her eyes. “I’ve been so alone for so long, and everything was falling apart around me. I had no will of my own, no life to speak of. You wouldn’t understand.”

He moved to her and took her hand in his.

“Yes,” he replied. “Actually, I do believe I would.”

Then the light came.