To: condorboy
Date: Saturday, October 8—3:18 PM
Subject: nightmares
Dear Connor,
I’m sorry. I really am. I’m feeling selfish and broken. Do you think anyone’s ever gotten dehydrated from crying? Like cried so hard all the moisture just drains out of them and their cells shrivel up like tiny raisins until all that’s left is a leather-covered skeleton in the fetal position, the skull twisted into a tortured expression of the worst pain in the history of the world? What happens when you can’t stop crying? What happens if the calm after the storm never comes? What if it’s just storm after storm after storm, hurricanes and tornadoes and every other possible kind of weather, with no end? What if everything’s ripped out of the ground until there’s nothing left, not even tumbleweeds? What then? What do you do with nothing?
I had a dream last night and it’s not gone yet. In the corner of my eye, it is still playing out. I look around my room and everything seems different, like someone came in while I was sleeping and moved things around. Not too much, though, just an inch here and there, just enough to make me feel crazy. I’ve managed to pee and have a little breakfast, I’m sitting up in bed and I’m writing to you, but I’m still not convinced it wasn’t real, that this is real. Maybe this is the dream and that’s the awake and you’re just a figment of my imagination, something I created to make me feel less alone. You weren’t in the dream, Connor. There wasn’t even a memory of you.
It’s not Seattle. Maybe it’s New York, Chicago, or Boston, some cold city that could be any city. I am older. I can feel the wrinkles around my eyes. I can feel years of my life wasted. I am working at some cheap restaurant that could be any cheap restaurant, the kind with mismatched silverware and fading wallpaper, the kind where men in tattered jackets buy cups of coffee and stay all day. There are some regulars who tip pretty well if I lean over and let them look down my shirt when I deliver their food. The restaurant is in a neighborhood like any bad neighborhood, the kind where crazies come in and hassle the customers for change. On the coldest nights, sometimes they just walk in and stand there until we kick them out. There’s one guy who comes in sometimes and just starts screaming. He never hurts anybody, just screams and screams until we give him a cup of coffee and guide him out the door. He likes me the best. He calls me Mary.
There are months of this wrapped up into just a fraction of the dream, identical days multiplied in some synapse to communicate time passing, familiarity, routine. There is time wrapped up in a neat bundle with a tag that reads “Before.” The After is implied. No introduction is necessary. There is the guy who calls me Mary, but now he has a gun. He is shoving it in my face and his hand is around my neck, and I guess I just break, something inside me breaks, and when the gun goes off I disappear. Just like that—poof!—gone. His hand is around something he cannot see; my clothes and apron and a tray full of lunches are suspended in midair. People are screaming but they sound like waves to me, like slow-motion ocean. So I get out of there as quick as I can, running so fast it’s like I’m floating, tearing my clothes off and my earrings and my shoes until there’s nothing left and I’m just naked and invisible and wandering the streets of some cold city I cannot name.
I have to go somewhere, so I decide to go to him. He is Trevor but he is not Trevor. He is not in a band and living in Portland. This is a different story. He is just some guy I know nothing about. My subconscious doesn’t bother writing him a history, doesn’t hand me another package wrapped in synapses. But I still go to him, even though I don’t know who he is. I still go to him because, in this dream, I have nowhere else to go.
I am in an empty seat on a Greyhound bus, next to an old lady who sleeps the entire ride. At one point she burps in her sleep, pats my invisible arm, and says, “Excuse me, dear,” and falls back asleep. I have nothing with me, no clothes, no food, and it is starting to snow. I walk barefoot along the road. I can’t see if my feet are turning blue, if my skin is rough with goose bumps, if my nipples are hard like pebbles. The roads are empty. There is no one to see my footprints in the snow. When a car passes, I stand still, the snowflakes falling around me and melting in the shape of a girl in midair. I hold my breath so no one can see the warm air inside me coming out.
People don’t walk much in dreams. Is the journey a waste of the subconscious? Is it only the destination that matters? One minute you are in one place, and the next you are somewhere else. There is a seat on a bus, then a snow-covered road, then a chair in his bedroom. Connect-the-dots without the lines. There is me, invisible, waiting. There is his unmade bed and the horny boy’s bottle of lotion on the nightstand, the box of Kleenex. There’s the bookcase with untouched Nabokov, Joyce, Kafka, the AP English names he drops to impress girls like me. It smells like him, but not like him. There is something sour, something rotting.
Then he is in front of me. It is him, but it is not him. He is older, less beautiful, somehow smaller, more frail. He takes off his jacket and walks toward me. He is looking right at me, into my eyes. I could lean over and kiss him. I could whisper, “I am here.” He hangs the jacket on the coatrack. I hold my breath. I wonder if he smells me. He looks a moment more, but only sees the corner behind me.
The sun has set and there’s only a fuzzy blue tinge left of daylight. He turns on a lamp and it casts shadows through me. He kicks off his shoes, crawls into bed, and closes his eyes. I listen to him breathe until all the light is gone outside and everything is quiet. I watch him sleep until he’s dreaming, until his eyes are darting back and forth under his eyelids.
I turn off the lamp and everything is dark. I pull back the blankets and crawl in with him, pull the blankets over me. He is naked even though he wasn’t before. I feel his warm flesh touching the places where mine should be, his arms around me, pulling me closer, his leg over my hips, his face under my chin, breathing my neck in, painting it with his hot, sour breath. I hear him groan, feel him hard against my stomach, his hands grabbing at any part of me they can find.
But I know it is not me he is grabbing for. It is dark and I am invisible. He is asleep, and could be dreaming of anyone. But this has to be enough because it’s all I have. So I guide him inside me. His back arches and his hands grab blankets. I am on top of him, his hands on my hips, on my back, pulling me closer, his chest against mine. I can feel his heartbeat fighting mine, his nails digging into my back, his arms squeezing me closer like he wants to consume me, like he wants to destroy me. I would let him. I would let him eat me if he wanted to. I would let him do anything.
I cannot tell if his eyes are open or closed. I cannot see anything, not his face, not his body, not his mouth, open and wanting. I can just feel his hot breath on my neck, his hands around my ribs. I can hear his small, deep moans, my own, our bodies moving between sheets, the headboard’s soft thump against the wall. These are the only sounds in the world. We are the only two people. There is nothing to feel except him inside me, his body against the hole where I should be. He is making me exist. His desire is tracing a shadow around me. Everything is touching and connected and glued together, the sweat making oceans across our skin. There is nothing to hear but his voice gasping my name, but it is not my name, it is any name, a blank space, and that is when we both come, when the world stops and turns black and nothing will ever be the same again.
He collapses with a sigh and I am still on top of him. I cannot see him but I can paint his face on the darkness. My fingers move across his closed eyelids, his strong nose, his soft mouth. His breathing slows and he lets out a little whine as his hands move me off of him. He is done with me. He turns to his side and returns to sleep like nothing happened.
I wash up in the dirty bathroom that smells like the worst parts of him. I am not surprised to not see myself in the mirror. I rub some toothpaste on my teeth, drink water from the faucet, feel it pass right through me. I hear an ambulance somewhere in the distance and the dream starts slipping away, and I know then that I’m not just invisible. I’m even less than that. I am nothing.
Connor, can you imagine what it feels like to wake up and realize you’re dead? That you love someone who can’t even see you? I am tired, Connor. I am so tired I don’t want to wake up.
Isabel