I once wrote a post about a nightmare I had had, and it was up on this site for all of twenty minutes before I deleted it. A friend told me it was too disturbing.

I still have it saved in my docs, and I go back and reread it every now and then. There was this one image that has followed me for months: a pile of tarot cards was scattered across the floor beside my bed, but they were all face down, and when I tried to scrabble at their edges to lift them up I couldn’t get my nails under them, and they turned to dust beneath my fingers. There was a suitcase under the bed, and there was a rat inside it, chewing a hole through the canvas, and I was the only one that didn’t want to kill it.

I had another nightmare a few days ago, the plot of which my subconscious borrowed heavily from the trailers for A Quiet Place (that I’ve been watching obsessively and am very excited to see)– but that I can’t quite shake. I lived on a cliffside near the ocean with a bunch of other women, and we couldn’t say a word to one another unless we were beside running water. There was this monster that was hunting us, and we had to figure out a way to kill it.

I don’t remember how exactly I did it, but I was the one who delivered the final blow. And the people wanted to give me the bones of the creature I had killed, but I asked them to dump the bones into the sea, where it would be eternally deaf. I remember saying that. “Eternally deaf.” I remember standing on the cliff watching them slide the giant skeleton into the water.

Someone was talking in my philosophy class the other day about how when a whale dies in the ocean, the blubber floats to the surface, but the bones sink to the bottom and other sea critters make homes in the debris. I left class and walked along the sidewalk trying to imagine New York City as if it were bones we had made a home in. What kind of creature had had all of this inside of it, and what had risen to the surface when it had died. Did it like what we had done with it.

It’s been something of a struggle here, lately, but I like to imagine myself living in the skeleton of some otherworldly thing. I’ve been on a quest for perspective, to pull away some of the attention from all of my flaws and obstacles and opposition and put the world in a bigger scope again. Realize I exist beyond the pain that’s right in front of me. I’ve never been the biggest advocate of “living in the moment,” because sometimes that’s too much– too similar to pressing on a fresh wound. So I try to look forward, even if it detracts a little from what I’m experiencing presently. But the only way I can start to move is if I know where I’m going, or at least have some idea, or at least know that all wounds scab over eventually.

There’s always going to be another nightmare that I won’t be able to make sense of, and another city that I won’t know from where it came, and another fresh wound I won’t want to look at until it’s stopped bleeding. And there’s something in that last part that I didn’t even realize I felt until I typed it.

But for now I’m in this skeleton, looking towards the end of the street, looking at my feet as I walk down staircases, and hoping that if I trip, I can get back up again, because I know these are things I survive.

Too disturbing? Too bad. I’m sick of editing my soul to be palatable.

All my heart.

xx,
Meg.