Little Misfits — a place for occasional short unclassifiables ... fictions? ... not fiction, not non-fiction, neither fiction nor non-fiction ... neither neither nor both ...
If you dramatized a nightmare would it look like this? The stranger coming into your room at night, hovering over your bed, spectral until she turns out to be a woman you haven’t seen in fifteen years?
You say her name and she disappears. What did she want? What was she doing here?
You wake yourself still dreaming, knowing you were dreaming but not that you are, asking what made that visitation a nightmare, the fact of entry, sudden appearance, or the woman herself, shambolic, lithic, both?
Your sleeping mind stalls. Your waking mind probes. Darkness descends.
In the morning you ask your questions again, the visitation harmless now, forgettable.
In the night the woman returns, bringing chaos like a bag of stones. Do not forget me, she says. Remember when I came to you then, in the night, wrapped in blankets, running from desire, begging you for haven, for safety, for witness.
You thought it was my own desire I was running from, she says. You thought I was your younger self. But I was never you, and the desire I ran from was his.
Is this why I’m your nightmare? she asks.
In the morning you’re unsure what you might have thought in the past or what the dream woman said you thought and what she claimed instead was true.
With all that confusion, you forget to be afraid.
When she comes again, you forget to shrink, you forget to wake yourself in the dreaming, you forget that you don’t know who this stranger is. You think you know her face, you think she’s not a stranger, and when she taps you on the shoulder, or the cheek or the forehead, you’re nowhere anymore to feel yourself made stone.