The place where the walls turn to sand

Note: I wrote this two months ago, and didn't post it because it's fucking weird.

Summer is over. I dance in piles of leaves as they fall from the trees in bursts of glitter, the sky turning a deep shade of orange. The full moon rises, making all the leaf piles glow like they are lit from within, and I fall back into one and make a leaf angel. How will this autumn ever top the best summer of my life?

The breeze shifts slightly and summer is snuffed out in an instant.

All the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and I forget all about the 'best summer of my life', about fun and frivolity and joy, as my breath catches in my throat.

There is no chill in the air yet, but I know it's coming.

I know you are coming.

My heart is racing and I'm trying to even my breathing, trying to stay silent, trying to be invisible, please say I'm invisible, please say you didn't notice.

Hands emerge from inside the earth and slide up my body to grasp hard around my throat.

I gasp but no air comes out. I choke as rough hands grab my thighs, my waist, and pull me into the Earth as I scream with no sound. I'm being dragged down, down through endless caving-in walls of sand and dirt and orange glitter leaves and I don't know how far this goes or if it even ends or if I'll ever taste air or feel the moonlight or see your face again. Or see my face again. Aren't they the same thing? I don't remember...

The Earth opens up into a black void and I'm falling, I'm falling and all I perceive are swirls of red-yellow and that chill that makes my bones freeze from the inside out. And somehow I've been here before, in a dream I've had many times.

A dream where I never made it out alive.

The fingernails around my neck dig hard into my skin and stars explode across my vision as I start to lose consciousness. I fight like hell... like I have in every dream before, until a thought stops me. Are you choking me, or are you choking yourself? We have the same face now.

You touch my cheeks as if we were lovers.

I take your fingers inside my mouth and swallow you whole and you become me, and death becomes me, and the leaves stop glowing and the world turns to darkness and the lights go out and all time stops and the world ends.

And there is nothing.

Ten days later. The mail is piled up outside the door, my cat pacing outside meowing for an owner that will not come. The moon is out, the leaf piles glow orange. A chill flows through the air.

A hand claws through the earth, followed by another, and I emerge, my summer red dress now stained black, my face covered in war paint, MY face, it's my face, I have my own face!

I stand in my front yard, lit up from within like moonglow, my cat sitting beside me like a right-hand-man, as I touch my face with wonder and glee.

And I look down to where the street goes dark and the neighbors say not to go at night, where you still are, where you will be, and I will face you, and I will walk with you there. And we will know each other.

And my face will always be mine.