A thousand punches rained down on me from above. As my defenses weakened, each became more damaging than the last. Suddenly, they stopped. I dropped the protective arm from my face and looked up in anguish. Scalding, sharp, stinging pain was my entire existence as I felt my face becoming inflamed in real time. Bleeding on the bathroom floor, she towered above me with her back now turned. Slowly, ever so slowly, she turned around and revealed her face. A cheshire cat mouth, filled with pointed, sharpened teeth and frigid, expressionless eyes.

“Are you ready for the last part?” she shrieked, and let out a piercing cackle as she savored my reaction. As I tried to scream for help, she lunged at my throat and —

As my eyes opened slowly, the light poured into my consciousness and cleansed me of my fear.

Have to find a way to know I am dreaming before it's over.. I thought as I resentfully and painfully pulled off my warm covers. Nature was calling, and I had long since accepted that I was subservient to nature. As I departed from my now empty slumber nest, I glanced outside and saw that it was still snowing. How many days in a row is that? I wondered to myself airily.

Stumbling down the hall on my way to the washroom, I could tell that I wasn’t yet ready to face the day. The overwhelming, familiar, amalgamated gremlin of weariness, dysphoria, and lamentation was wrapped around my knees. Sometimes I was lucky and it was hanging onto a part of me less strictly necessary for locomotion, but no matter what it was always present and pulling. Pulling, pulling, pulling. Pulling me down with perpetual and indubious dedication.

Despite the rote familiarity of this sequence, by the time I had finally trudged all the way to the washroom I was feeling worse than usual. Anxiety was in the midst of a terroristic hijacking of my train of thought, and, having already expended my willpower just to make it to the toilet, I gave it the free reign it demanded.

After finishing, I flushed the toilet and looked in the mirror. I looked terrible. My pasty white skin was nearly translucent. It looked like God himself, that ineffable prankster, had used liquid white-out to coat my skeleton. My eyes were swollen, and I could still see the bruise on my left cheek and accompanying scar across the bridge of my nose from the week before. Never again, I promised myself emptily.

As I was about to embark on the migration back to my bedroom, I felt a frightening, electric sensation shoot down each vertebrae in the xylophone of my spine sequentially and in rapid succession. Without knowing why, I held out my left arm and looked down. There was a large tattoo, written in dark capital letters with beautiful calligraphy:

YOU HAVE ALZHEIMERS. YOU LOVE YOUR WIFE. YOU ARE ABOUT TO DIE.

A small motor in the pit of my stomach jump-started. As it continued to accelerate, I felt tingling in my fingertips as I slipped into the terror like a weighted vest.

I stopped in place and waited. All I could hear was my heartbeat, which now sounded like it's origination point was inside my head.

I peered into the hallway, and waited. Did I just hear the front door? The lines between reality and paranoia were blurring again, and I tried to remember what the doctor had told me about maintaining a militant divide.

I stood there for a long time, waiting. Nothing was happening, and my terror was proportionately dissipating.

Just then, I felt a tap on my shoulder, and whirled around.

“Are you ready for the second part?”