I am very small. Teeny, tiny, shrinking, minute. I come home full of the reek of the cafe, my efforts there, the people there, and I shed it all to disappear.
This is how: remove shoes, place keys on plate for keys. Put away pursey thing. Trade pants for pjs, shirt for t-shirt. Stare at the bed. Will self to find some other healthy thing to do than stare at the bed and/or get in it.
Give in. Fold self into sheets and blankets and cold and panic. Disregard outside noises as they disregard you.
There. You don't exist.
This doesn't actually work, I realize, as much as I pray and hope and will it to work. I close my eyes and wish sleep would shut my brain down. Sleep never shuts anything off for me; it recycles, rekindles, reimagines... Lately I dream of dead bodies cornering me, all of them replicas of myself. I battle them one at a time until I'm so exhausted that I have to wake up. In these dreams, each injury I inflict on the dead bodies lacerates my body as well.
I don't know why I feel like writing about that dream. I usually keep my nightmares and daymares to myself because they make me feel completely out of control and crazy. I have this weird feeling that writing about them makes them more permanent, as though I have some power over them at all (which, it turns out, I don't.) I've tried so many weird little things to keep my dreams as ephemeral as possible. Nothing really works. I might as well write about them.
Last night as I tried to relax myself for sleep after a fitful waking, I thought again of how I used to stretch my arms across the bed when I was little. I must have been tiny - I remember wanting to be able to reach both edges of the bed and not quite being able to. I wonder how, at such a young age, I'd garnered this sense of having to hold on tight to the world in my sleep, as though it would continually attempt to buck me off. These days I wonder how I can reconfigure myself to let go.
2 comments:
JoBiv! The next time you are in hell--er, "home," please please please let me know. I'll come save you! Victor isn't much of a drive, and besides, there can be a Panera in Henrietta on the way. Mmmm ...
Drop me a line sometime.
I actually spent this morning trying to will myself back to sleep - it was a strange bed, which didn't help, and I've been obsessing over my move and other things (family stresses), and I find, too, once my brain is on... it won't go off. I do think writing one's dreams - letting them out for others to see, too - takes away their power. Hope it helps.
PS - Hi there - I found you!
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