Destiny City’s institute for the mentally ill was a cold place, directed by an equally frigid woman.
Alessa was a nurse. She’d always been a nurse, as far as she could remember – that is, not too far away, actually. Did she love her job? It was a sweet euphemism, as nobody who worked there could ever like it. Did she do a good work at pretending she did? She did smile as much as she could. Her pink lips exhibited an insincere and emotionless smile. But everyone else pretended this was a warm smile, and so did the patients, and so did she.

She went to see her first patient of the day. A boy with red hair, and absent grey eyes, surrounded by black circles. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a while. She sat down in front of him, to listen to his problem, and ignored the mad scribbling on the wall.
“There was that girl who liked me, and I pretended I liked her, too. That was still fun while it lasted. She fell for it, that was pathetic, but we both enjoyed it. That was a nice dream. But then, I woke up.”
Miss David finished writing this in her notes, with a strange melancholy tugging at her heart, she got up, and left his room.

There, there was a man with short blond hair, pink eyes, and rectangular glasses similar to hers. He had compulsions, and would keep reorganizing the things in the room, even though they’d disappear right as she would stop looking at them. He never actually looked at her, more interested in putting every single hair at their right place, but he still told his story.
“I dreamed I fell in love with the daughter of my parents’ enemies. We pulled a Romeo and Juliet, and we ran away from them together, I dropped from university, and then, we had a daughter. She was plain and uninteresting. And then, I woke up.”
Miss David finished writing this as well. She gave the older man a sad smile before leaving, as if she knew what he had been talking about.

The next patient was a tiny and shy girl, with long hair of a dark purple shade. She was curled up on her stool, her arms wrapped in bandages, her face and feet covered in self-inflicted injuries. She talked with a faint and sad voice.
“My life had been chaotic until I met some girl. She was nice, but when my [mumble – Alessa didn’t catch the word] had an accident, she couldn’t do anything because she was so helpless. She wasn’t at the right place, she was so useless it made me even sadder, and I was so sad already. Then I woke up.”
Miss David finished writing this. She wanted to say she was sorry, but the words wouldn’t come out.

Next, there was a catatonic girl who couldn’t be older than her. Strange clothes were worn in an equally strange way, as if someone else had dressed her for fun, including a sort of eyepatch on her right eye. Her skin was dark, and her hair as pale as the walls of the room. Her speech was extremely monotonous, and had Alessa not paid attention to every single word, she could have mistaken her story for meaningless babbling.
“I was a hero. That was hard. I didn’t ask for it. I saved many people’s life. I saved one girl’s life. She could have saved herself if she’d just run away. But she stayed there just like that. So I had to save her myself. She tried to thank me out of guilt. But there was nothing she could do. Nothing that equalled my saving her life. I’m not sure if anyone would have missed her if I didn’t do it. And I woke up.”
Miss David finished writing this. It wouldn’t all fit on the rest of the page, so she kept writing in thin air, not that it mattered, because the words would change every time she would take a look at it (not that she ever did). Something in her mind wanted to whisper a “thank you”, but it didn’t make sense, because that girl wasn’t a superhero, she was mentally ill.

It felt like she had seen an infinity of patients, each one with different troubles, each one retelling their part of a much bigger dream, a dream that was surrealistically dull in places, and Alessa knew they all had been talking about her, and that she had shared the same dream as every single one of them. But she couldn’t tell anybody she woke up from it. Nobody would be happy to find out all these years were a produce of her derided imagination and poor sanity.
She still had two patients to check.

This one was wearing rugged clothes. She had a mass of poorly-kept curly brown hair, and dark eyes hidden by the smoke of a cigarette – that was sometimes a cig, sometimes a joint, sometimes a pipe – held firmly in her mouth, but that didn’t hinder her speech, somehow.
“I dreamed my parents loved me. I dreamed that a superhero saved me. I dreamed that a boy genuinely loved me, and that I love him back. I dreamed that I was somehow so interesting that monsters attacked me. I dreamed that my family hated me because they were just mean. I dreamed I was you. But I woke up, and nobody liked me when I did.”
She stared at her nurse twin intensely. “Nobody does, right?”
She knew.
Miss David didn’t write this down, but she felt sorry for not doing a better job at… at whatever she had failed.

“The last one is downstairs”, said the woman at the head of the institute, pointing at a door in the hall. Alessa pushed it, and walked down an infinity of stairs down to the basement, darkness engulfing everything a bit more at each step.
She reached the floor, and saw the last patient in the dark. She was curled up against the wall. She was thin, incredibly thin, actually, she was an emaciated corpse, and her skin was rotten and red, and her hair was pale blond and half of it had fallen off.
Miss David kneeled in front of her, trying to look at her face. “This is Miss David. I am here to listen to you today, Miss-”
The corpse raised her head, her features had melted on her face with the rot, only showing a single, glowing green iris on a blood red sclera, and a mouth. She advanced her jaw towards the nurse with a creepy, unnatural, mechanical sound – -

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Alessa woke up at 3 am, shaking. How could she still take it? All nights had been bringing their share of accusing symbolism, of guilt, of fear, of sadness, of gore (and though Bad-a** or Zombiecity could be blamed for that last part, it certainly didn’t explain why she had never had any problem with violence all these years before, nor did it explain the rest), and that was wearing her down.
Even worse, she was starting to wonder when she would realize that her life was a badly-written fiction. She wondered when she would realize that there was no way reality could be so ridiculous and nonsensical, and when she would wake up for good.

She didn’t go back to sleep that night.