My lil’ sister told me she had a dream in which we were both executed by bow and arrow. She prefaced it with “it was so horrible, you don’t even want to know”. She was right, I really hadn’t wanted to know.
I try to abstain from hearing other people’s dreams, especially when I’ve made a cameo through no fault of my own. It’s jarring to find out how someone else’s subconscious sloppily pieces you together. Why is it benign to anecdotally describe how I annoyed you so much in your dream that you had to punch me in the face? You’ve confirmed my suspicions with a smile on your face (in front of all my coworkers, thanks, boss). It’s akin to being set up by friends, a well-intentioned gesture until you show up for dinner facing the person you know your friends look down on. You’re not disappointed in the date, just in the new awareness you have about your own worth in your friends’ eyes.
I braced myself for the worst as though my little sister was going to say “you were a sad lonely spinster with lots of hobbies and we all felt so sorry for you.” So I was relieved to find out the story was a one sentence retelling of a somewhat unlikely demise. We were making cake pops. I chuckled at the dream and she seemed less sure it was funny. She was right though. We are, of course, vulnerable.
On a recent Saturday I woke up to find two equally bizarre text messages that could not have been more ominous in how they were timed together. One was a long text about not letting the devil into your life, a concept not entirely objectionable when completely removed from context. However, the way to prevent the devil from coming into your life is, apparently, to forward the text message to ten other people. Well…oops. I don’t like being reminded that I don’t know ten people or that I’m always the dead end for chain mail or that I am passively sinning yet again.
Text message two was from an old friend “D” that I happened to have been infatuated with for roughly seven years. “D” is a man I met at 18, when I still believed I liked men but only a narrow subset of them. So he basked in my awe for his body and popularity and I basked in his awe for my…I don’t even know really. And we had a fun year of getting drunk and falling on top of each other followed by 6 years of my inability to stop daydreaming what if while he popped in and out of my life depending on his volatile relationship to alcohol. If he was trying to clean up his act, he was on the phone crying to me each night. But when he gave up on sobriety, he ignored me, flaked out on me in every borough, mocked me for expressing concern. I developed a weird relationship to my phone and the amount of grief it gave me for either not ringing or for finally ringing.
No matter how many times throughout those years in New York I reinvented myself, whenever “D” contacted me, I crumbled. I couldn’t fathom why someone reaches out to say “hi, you’re important let’s be friends I’m sorry” only to rescind it, leave you hanging, suggest you shouldn’t be friends after all. Each reconnection resulted a spiral. First angry texts that kept me up all night and and then single spaced apologetic emails that included bullet-pointed reasons for why we should still be friends.
I loathed him as an individual. He got away with saying things that would make me get up and leave a conversation with other people. It was a compulsive attachment. I used to wonder each day when I got off the train would there be a single day before I died when I didn’t think of him. I still can’t even think of stepping off the F train at my stop without also remembering that thought.
I basically had to move cities. If only I had cared about anything else only half as much during my twenties. Perhaps I’d have a rewarding relationship or a career I cared about or a lot more knowledge. Three years passed since moving away and I rarely think about him and when I do, it is with relief that that phase is over.
I sat with the messages for a good two days before telling anyone about them, much less responding to them. The first, I decided to forget about. It crossed a boundary and I didn’t want to embarrass my little sister by making a big deal of it. I responded to “D”, gave him some updates (although not many). I debated ways of asking “are you getting sober again” but I didn’t need to because he spit it out first. A new boyfriend helping him get sober; he thinks about me a lot; he’s rereading unaccustomed earth, the only book that I gave him and he actually read. I sent him a few texts throughout the week. I feel like I’m trying to drink only one glass of wine when the bottle’s right in front of me. It’s why I don’t drink. I know I’ve changed and I’m better. But it doesn’t mean I’m not still vulnerable to this.
Back at the cake pops my little sister tells me that her cousin had a “mental something” and had to go to a certain type of hospital. Breakdown? “Yes,” she says before laying down details I actively try not to show any reaction to. The pieces fall into place. There’s some relief knowing the text hadn’t been sent for the purpose of revealing my atheistic horns with the lesbian hooves. My best friend was institutionalized when I was 15. I still replay the events and it’s a decade and a half later. At least she got help I tell my little sister, wondering if she is as mad as I was when the world seemed to say “you know that person you love and relate to? Yeah, they see things so distortedly that we are going to remove them from life for a bit.”
I’m glad I have this moment to bake and talk about life but I’m a little worried when the cake pops end up on the floor and my little sister stands by the window to silently deal with her frustration. They aren’t perfect easter chicks. In defense of her anger:
Bull Dyker 