Montage of a dream reoccurred

Pic edited by d1ttooo

Every night I wake up, covered in so much sweat that it might be piss. Heart beating steady in my chest, following like thunder to lightning. Plagued by nightmares. Every single one is the same thing; an infinite loop. A fear that I cannot outrun. It sinks into the crevices of my brain, sticky black sludge. It’s been tarred and feathered. My thoughts are drowning, my thoughts are turning into a bird and flying into the window glass leaving a greasy stamp. Sometimes it causes my brain to stick to the back of my skull and I have to shake my head to jiggle it free. If I got bored enough I could use it to encase lunchmeat. I seem to have lost myself trying to hide from this doom. The first time was when I was six. I can almost remember the feeling of my soul slipping from my body like a balloon out of the car window. Sucked away faster than you could catch your breath, floating up to the stars and moon and a black hole. When I was young, my mother would tie my balloons to my wrist with a slipknot. The pearlescent string tugging on my arm, causing my limp hand to bob like a buoy. Sometimes I would slip my hand out, transfer the balloon to something else, an organ transplant. I would hope that all my worries were encased in that cherry-red sphere, that I could give them away like a 25 cent gumball to whatever appendage could fit it. A worry can fill any hole if it’s the same shape as its owner. 

Sometimes I would slot my name into stories I saw in the newspaper. I thought maybe I could take on their life, their debt, their dreams. I’d sit at the table, pushing aside spilled salt and report cards that never said a pleasure to have in class. I’d peer at the black and grey until my eyes dimmed and my head was heavy, swimming with baseball scores, puppies for sale, three teens dead from drunk driving into the mall. My forehead would spill over, rimmed like a margarita glass with table salt and crumbs of powdered parmesan cheese. I would do a ritual that I read in a book about manifestation that we got from the store that sells incense and rocks out of a giant wooden drum. Close my eyes fist-tight, imagine myself in the home of Larry Jenson, age 58. I pictured myself lying down with my orthopedic shoes still muffling my sweating feet like rabid dogs. They’re unhappy when they are tamed.  The bed was firm and smelled like beer, and smoke, and time. I wondered what Larry dreams of. Thick cigars that sprayed smoke into your eyes like a blizzard. The one time his golf score was better than his boss’s. His wife, who stopped smiling with the corners of her eyes seven years ago, back when he was a drunk.

When I crack my eyes, I get scared to look at first. I hold my breath like Larry’s life might slip through my fingers, all sand and no shells. But I am always there, in the dining room that suffocates me with its familial tension. I know I will lay down in my bed, the one vaulted to the ceiling like I am hiding up in heaven, and I will fall asleep so gently that it feels like a trap. I’ll run around in dreams filled with bakeries where I forget what I am about to order so the image disintegrates until my brain auto-generates a new pastry. I am in schools where you take a roller-coaster that’s the same as I95 through the campus and I am always missing my class, or my essay, or my fucking bus. Once there was a teacher I wanted to fuck, he wore his hair in a bun and I wanted to slip my pencils into it, feel how it would tug back, its own sort of gravity. He chased me around, as I slipped down the halls, no traction to my feet, floors waxed so they shined back your own tepid reflection. He was trying to give me a lobotomy, but I think I still kind of wanted to fuck him. That isn’t the scary part.

Stalking me in every scene, a bloody-minded Where’s Waldo. Close to my height, although shorter than me, I can’t find it before it comes. I run into the monster in the bathroom that doesn’t lock, sweaty with tongue on my girlfriend. When I look in her eyes, I can only see a flash of surprise. It jumps fox-quick out as soon as it entered and maybe she never loved me. I’m pressed underneath the creature, it slips a blade right through my ribs. I’m splayed out, dissection frog in anatomy class. I can feel the knife searching for heart and not just lung.  As my blood pools and my body reaches the temperature of the room, I look at the stain I’ve made on my grandmother’s tar-tinted carpet where I took my first steps, I hope she forgives me. It doesn’t need an action, the presence torments me enough. I scream to the sky, puffy and bruised like a black eye and I hear the sound shatter the clouds. Glass pours out, rains my face into shreds. It’s coming, it’s coming, it's coming. Sometimes it grabs me by the hair like it's pulling the plug out of the drain. Plucks me right out of my hand-me-down army boots like the soaped up hair clogging the bath. I think if it threw me in the trash, gagging at the slippery lump of pubes, anti-dandruff shampoo and every hair that I’ve ever had on my head, I’d feel more at ease. That would imply that it wants to be free of me. What is a flogger without their victim? If they can’t pound marks of puerile ownership into the flesh of the one who has surrendered, then they are useless. Sometimes it never comes, I spend the waiting in fear. I sit on the curb like a sign on the road, and yet nothing comes. Suddenly I’m begging. Don’t leave me alone. Don’t leave me here. 

          For the rest of my life, and the rest of my dreams, I think my monster will chase me. Linked to me through something stronger than blood. A ventricle, a chain tethering us together. An umbilical cord that was never snipped wrapped like a serpent on my tender throat. It will constrict me and play with me like I’m a mouse, insignificant prey, a heart fragile as a blueberry. In the end, my monster will consume me whole. Eat me to my core and pull out my spine like a string of pearls. Oh. Did I say monster? I meant mother.