2026.001
The purgatory period is over today. Since Christmas, I painted my kitchen & bedroom, cleaned out my drawers, replaced the bedside table, & threw out the trash. For six days consistently, I cooked myself warm lunches, took long showers in silence, & walked in the cold without a cup of coffee. I’ve also been sleeping alone during this time & a series of uncanny dreams has shaken me out of sleep each night.
In these dreams, I experience torture of all sorts. On the night of December 30th, Blake Lively is my stepmother. She says I am “hard to look at,” & pulls my hair while I scream. As I take the first bite of a slice of apple pie, she cuts open my t-shirt from behind with scissors. She almost punctures near my spine with the sharp metal gadget, but she is not bothered. I remind her that I am traumatized from the last time I got a spinal tap, but my voice isn’t reciprocated. I think about my sister, although she is not present in the house. The apple pie is nowhere to be found, & the black countertop is full of Honey Crisps & potato chips. Blake Lively is a skinny woman with large breasts, & she drags me by my ankle into the bathroom with ease, like she is a giant or I am a dwarf. I see sequins fall off her clothes onto the floor. I am stripped of the rest of my clothes & put in the bathtub. Blake Lively hits me in the head with her hand. I bang the temple of my head on the faucet, & she frantically cuts my hair with her scissors, close to the scalp. She pulls out a rough sponge & rubs it against my limbs all over. She splashes hot water on me over & over, tries to scrub away at something I can’t see. The strands of my dark hair glue onto my skin & every surface of the bathroom. I beg her to let me go home. She breaks my nose. I wake up sneezing.
To record the terrorizing sequence of events in the dream feels like an unnecessarily prolonged affliction, but I sleep with my phone next to my head, & I am not much without my desire to turn the ridiculous & fleeting into anything visible or legible or tangible. So it isn’t hard to believe that I wanted to get drunk on the 31st, pass out on the bed with no memory of anything, & sleep like my consciousness is locked up in a thoughtless jail. After years of irregular streaks of nightmares (or night terrors or whatever they’re called), I grew a hatred for the idea of epiphanies. This may sound contradictory to my love for poems, but a poem sits at the most advanced stage of synthesizing life’s mystery. A poem is an exacting result of a writer’s resistance towards reduction or exaggeration, her last-ditch effort to capture something complex as is, to disobey the human instinct to make sense of scattered & disconnected information, learn a lesson out of a mere coincidence, create a miracle or hope inside an utterly indifferent world that is life. Most good poems are, or at least they try to be, anything but epiphanies. & in that same vein, I am repulsed by Dream As A Glimpse Of The Subconscious/Unconscious. I am not trying to debate Freud here, but rather, trying to decide for myself that I won’t be held hostage to my own stories.
When I say I won’t be held hostage to my own stories, I mean I won’t let them change the way I feel about writing about them. A bad dream cannot threaten me with turning into a prophecy, & a devastating, perilous emotion cannot threaten me with sticking around forever. A prescient piece of writing can perhaps only be an achievement, never a goal. In her 2017 documentary, Joan Didion recalls when she was in El Salvador during the Civil War. She describes what she saw, which most people could only call tragic– children in alleyways high on acid, hallucinating, dying. After a discernible pause, she says, “It was gold.” She meant it was literary gold– the type of story that writers only dream of stumbling upon, if one can effectively set aside righteousness, guilt, & self-centeredness in the equation of writing. To feel bad is a lazy response as a writer, & this is uncomfortable to accept until you are stuck in a carousel of easy, meaningless stories that no one would or should give a damn about.