An Interruption of My Reverie in OD OG

I am standing in the kitchen of a cottage I don’t recognize.

The kitchen is a rich blue with pops of yellow gingham. Daffodils in a cobalt vase. Curtains that actually complement the walls. Copper pans dangling from hooks above an island topped with mosaic tiles of Old Dutch porcelain. It’s not the kitchen of my current reality—which is an ugly kitchen of browns & greens with mismatched curtains my ex’s ex-wife sewed. In my actual kitchen, the peeling wallpaper is covered in ugly sepia plants, labeled by name in italicized, old fashioned script. A dead garden of helleborus niger and parasol mushrooms and diospyros kaki. Surrounded by faded fronds and fungi and fruit. The paper peels away from the drywall in places like the plants are being picked by an unseen hand. The harvest of our poverty, the bounty of our dysfunction.

But I am not there in this dream.

In this dream, I am in the most beautiful kitchen I have ever seen. There are plants in the windows and not just trying to crawl off my rotting wall. Ivy plants. Their vines unfurl towards the ground, greedy for room, searching for sun. I am humming, as I water them. It would appear I am happy here.

After that task is completed, I put the coffee on. The air sits heavy in the kitchen with the smell of the roasted beans. I pour myself a cup of daily stamina and I wait for MC to join me downstairs in the little alcove where I’m sitting with a book of poetry… Frank O’Hara. I cradle my coffee mug, dragging sips out of my mug, feeling the warmth in my throat like a favorite song. The moment feels collected & unhurried, like the very best of all Sundays. It feels like the life I would design for myself.

The door bell rings.

An interruption of my reverie.

I am not expecting company, but I run through the hall lightly on the balls of my bare feet, trying not to thud my way heavily to the door. The parquet floor is slightly sticky with polish. I peer through the peephole, but I can’t see anyone on the front porch. I step outside into the brilliance of the sun.

Just as I clear the threshold, my arm is wrenched to the side. I am off kilter, drunk with the violent change to my center of gravity. I turn to see your face. Even in my dream, I know you are supposed to be dead-that it’s some kind of hellacious wrinkle in reality for you to be here. You crawled in through a tear in the backdrop and made your way into this dreamscape. You shouldn’t be here. In my dream. At this cottage with the lovely kitchen I’ve always wanted. That I live in with my beloved. A scream is let loose from my throat-just winds up like a twister and spins out of me. I scream for MC to help me, hoping to wake him up. My arm throbs a bruise-y purple as I try to pull it away. You cling tighter. Leech. Octopus. You motherfucker. I am trying to peel your farm-toughened fingers off my forearm, but each time I succeed in loosening your grip, you punch me repeatedly with your other fist. My face feels hot from the impact. I feel blood trickling out of my ear onto my neck, a dangling ruby earring. You have split my lip, my teeth are smeared with the lipstick of your violence.

I’m disoriented from being hit and you are dragging me off the steps towards the piece of shit car you have rumbling in the driveway. Plumes of exhaust. Deathrattling muffler. I know I cannot get in the car. You are going to rape and probably kill me—finish what you started all those years ago. I try to pull my phone from my dress pocket to call 911, but you smack it out of my hands. A bully slapping books out of the nerd’s hands in the hallway. My phone hits the ground and shatters in a twinkling to a spiderweb of cracks. I feel a gut drop of dismay, hopelessness. You have already gotten me down the steps, despite my attempts to twist away from your grip.

I don’t know how such an elderly man is so strong, untiring. You are inhuman in your strength and I feel bested. I bonelessly slide to the ground, spine full of jelly. It is a move I used as a child to try & prevent you and your ratdick kidfucker friend from hurting me. The limp-bodied tactic never worked back then, you would just pick me up onto the bed &, well….—but maybe now, with all the deadweight I’ve accumulated…You laugh, recognizing what I’m doing, “you stupid bitch, since when has that ever worked?!” You kick me once in the side before dragging me to the car, by my arms. I feel my shoulders straining in their sockets. The sidewalk scrapes skin from my legs. Last ditch effort ditched. Finally, I beg you to stop, to please let me go, to please just let me be happy—I’m finally happy. “You’ve already had me,” I plead, “Please, you’ve already had me. There’s nothing you haven’t already touched here.”

You open your trunk. I can’t move… There is terror in the marrow of my bones. You grab me by the throat, slam my head up against the side of the car. Constellations of pain flash in the space behind my eyes….just like when you used to slam me up against the wall of your trailer when I threatened to tell my mom what you were doing. I remember, I remember. Goddammit, I fucking remember.

Still MC never comes. No one does.

Then…the frames skip, slur ahead…

Somehow I’m in the trunk. I don’t know how I got in. Climbed in? Was put in? I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. You are standing with the sun at your back, your features blacked out. You always were the total solar eclipse on my childhood. You pig. You piece of pedophiliac shit. I want to fucking kill you as you stand there, your hand on the trunk, captain of my fate. You tell me not to worry, we’ll have plenty of time to talk later when we get back to your place. And then, you shut the trunk.

In the dark of your trunk, I can do nothing but scream…I scream so long and hard and terribly in that trunk till I actually burst blood vessels in my eyes while I sleep. I scream till I wake myself up to this reality…This reality, where the wallpaper is ugly and I live with my ex and with the camouflaged pain of my terrible youth…but, what I will say about this version of life is this: as least, I can count on the dead to stay dead.