This disease I give to myself

I don't know if I could turn last night's dream into a story. It was shaking and adrenaline-charged when I was in it; from a waking perspective, most of the plot seems to have entailed me shouting at other characters in order to shock them compliant or at least get them out of my way or facing down the thing that was causing all the trouble: I was striding with rage from the beginning and by the end of the dream had settled down only to a resigned kind of anger that was mostly amusement, because what else was there to do? The thing was either an angel on the Rilke model (jeder schrecklich) or only called an angel because no one else could get a good look at it. From certain angles, it had a translucent, shimmery pollen-vagueness that could be mistaken for the tremble of light on feathers or the circling point-source of a halo. From others, it looked most like a crushed mélange of abyssal life, the needle-choked jaws and glaring white eyes of viperfish, the tight wet skin of a gulper like clingwrap across the milky bones, Bathynomus giganteus' segmented carapace and legs. Sometimes both at once: a graceful wing unfolding, the shadow of organs jerking under skin. It worked by suggestion; it spoke, or appeared to, or otherwise got inside the roommate of the girl who alerted me to its presence. She thought she was taking its hand and sank straight through the scrubby clay-blue of their dorm-room carpet, vanishing in front of the fireplace like a Victorian parlor trick; I hacked away the gritty loop pile and putty and bits of wood that smelled like boiling gelatin and uncovered her head, like a jar from an archaeological dig. I pulled her up by her hair and her eyes were blind as a viperfish, her teeth too glassy and crowded for her mouth. I didn't kill her. There was no one left inside. I took the other girl with me—the one I could protect—and started tracking the angel across a campus that was neither Brandeis nor Yale. It wasn't my job, in this world. I wasn't a demon slayer or an exorcist. I knew the thing for what it was and I knew I could threaten it and I didn't have time for people trying to talk me down from a paranoid fantasy or, once everyone could see it, stupid self-destruction. So, a lot of shouting. And then the thing that wasn't an angel, which didn't respond to human intimidation: I couldn't threaten to ruin its life or take its access to the mortal world away or even deprive it of worship, since it wasn't interested in any of those things. I could tell it, I'll be in you until the end of time. I will be the splinter rotting in your never-mortal flesh, the bone grating in your bodiless boundlessness. I will be humanity like a canker in you, the little flaw of salt and decay that nothing undying can touch to tear out or heal; I will not kill you and you will never get rid of me. And when it was all over, an ex-partner of mine (real, for a change) put their arm around their new (fictitious) partner and said confidentially they weren't at all surprised to hear I'd done it that way, because everyone knew I'd never gotten over them; at least I'd been able to turn my horrible unrequited obsessiveness to some useful end instead of eating my heart out to the rest of my days for something I couldn't have. And that was what made me laugh, in a church I didn't believe in, full of gilding and stained glass and normal human self-centeredness which did still tick me off, because seriously, man.

Basically, paging handful_ofdust. I didn't sleep very much or very well last night, but at least I got this out of it?