you are six years old & dreaming of a secret door in the basement that leads to your imaginary friend’s house, where the sun shines & its always playtime & no one had ever learned how to flinch. Its your favorite dream and you hope to have it every night.
you are 17 & you are dreaming of flying above your hometown, indigo quilt, sky with stars so cold they burn when you get too close (of course you get too close) & now they are a stove & you are four years old with skin made of wax & you are melting to the countertop, gently curling over the edge, dripping onto the floor. You used to dream about tornados. You used to dream about death. Your dreams used to make sense but now you are crawling through a parking lot on your hands and knees and your mother gives you the broken body of your misery in the form of a small fawn statue that cracks like an egg in your hands, hatching and pushing away the shell of itself to become a heart, pulsing, bleeding heart that drips much like wax under heat except this time the viscera between your fingers leaves a tackiness that lingers even after you wake up.
what did your mother say when she handed you the fawn-egg-heart? She said something important, you think. something meaningful— but it slips and you can’t quite remember her voice at all. haunting you, eating you alive- the way dreams are more vivid for not having described them to anyone or even yourself. Whose mother? Yours? And why? Why? Your hands— even after scrubbing them raw— they stick to each other, tacky like old glue.
Did you mention you never went back? That first dream, the one with the sunlight and the joy; It never happened again. the sun was there but it wasn’t the same as before. it melted you alive. You wished for so long, and so desperately, only remembering the feeling of it— Something for which there are no words. It broke the fawn-egg-heart cradled in your small burnt hands—
and it never even happened again.