this life that i've imagined

this life that i’ve imagined

i hate sleep. i’m terrified of naps. they feel like deaths.

i’ve had a recurring nightmare my whole life, with variations on details, but the structure remains the same:

i enter a building, often beginning as an apartment, and someone shows me units available for rent. they are beautiful. but soon i realize there are people living there—beds unmade, plates on the kitchen table, but the guide is gone and i try to find my way out. but i can’t.

i climb stairs, turn corners, until i am inside a fancy food court and inside a casino. when i turn to back out, the stairs are gone. no matter which way i turn, i can’t leave.

the casino becomes a hotel. the hotel becomes an office.

and always, always, it becomes a school, empty, and i’m running back and forth in the hallways with nobody in sight. when i peek in the rooms, the desks look old like from a different period in time and they are all covered in dust.

i can never leave.

for a few months earlier this year, the nightmares died down after stretches where i was having the same nightmare every night for weeks.

but it’s returned.

last night, i was in the building again. the details were slightly different, as if my brain was trying to rebuild it from memory because it had been so long.

it was an apartment. it was an office building. then it was a school. always a school.

but this time i made my way to the garage and i knew this was the way out, that if i could navigate through the many floors and rows of parked cars i could escape. i could see daylight.

then they converged on me, a group of security coming out of the shadows and from behind columns to grab me and drag me back, back inside to keep me there again, forever.

it kept looping. searching then the garage. and daylight. daylight. and being swarmed and captured and returned to captivity. there was a small opening that i managed to crawl through.

this time, only one person tried to stop me. i killed them.

i ran. i kept running and i was almost at the exit. then i heard crying.

a few yards away i saw a small crowd gathered. and this close to escaping, i chose to go see who was crying. i pushed through the crowd and saw a small gathering of people in a room crying and screaming. i walked in.

they were scratching at the concrete walls and a man was holding a dead child in his arms. it was his crying that i’d heard. there were no windows in this room—just solid concrete walls, and when i turned to leave, i saw that we were inside a cell. the steel bars of the doors had shut.

i woke up panting. it was still dark, but i could hear birds starting to make noise outside. i got up and walked out of the bedroom and into our hallway.

at the end of the hall, against the door to the bathroom, i saw a woman in a victorian era dress. her face was hidden in the shadow, except i could make out a bit of her eyes. she was watching me as walked toward her and her gaze followed me as i walked into the bathroom to pee.

then she was gone.

i have seen a girl here before, same place by the door, in a school uniform that looked to be from the 40s or 50s. her face also covered in darkness. i’ve seen her multiple times, same pose always, leaning against the doorway.

when i returned to bed, i started to hyperventilate. then cry. i couldn’t stop crying and it woke up judy and she tried to calm me down. it was a deep sobbing, full of grief.

i started thinking about that cell again where we were all trapped. i remembered how i realized i’d been in here the whole time. all of us in this room, including me, had been in there forever.

we were all dead, you see. the life i thought i’d been living—the poetry and the family and judy and the summers and the snow and kissing in new york and running with the fires in barcelona, the three-legged dog and my father’s cancer and my father’s failing heart and my mother’s small soft hands, the crying on airplanes and the leg that kept breaking—

this life i had lived was me dreaming after i had already died.