Beach

I went to the beach, and it was haunted by the ghosts of one hundred and forty-four people. They had been murdered one by one, in a line, starting with seven children, who had been allowed to run as fast as they could out along the sand, and seven dogs had been released to chase them down and tear each one brutally apart. And then the adults, lined up in increasing height order, had been told to lie on the sand just where the water begins and they were each shot one by one, and there was one woman who would shriek with terror as every shot was fired, and she was killed last because the killers really just enjoyed the sound of her terror.

I walked farther along the beach and found a spot to sit by the water. I was alone and I didn't know anybody around me, and I sat down in an empty spot on the sand which was where the children who were body-boarding kept washing up with their boards. I sat for a while and surf washed over me in little waves and it was all a normal beach or something, I suppose. And then I actually loved up from where I was sitting. I looked out at the water and I saw that way out in the water, but still so huge that they took up the entire field of vision and towered mind-bogglingly high up into the sky, until you couldn't even see where they ended, were these fantastic sheer rock formations, and they had been chipped apart in places by the processes of time, and that was how the water had come into this little area and made a weird, quiet little beach. And I looked longer at the cliff formations and I saw that they were covered in scaffolding, and one of the children that had been body-boarding near me appeared and said they were trying to rebuild them cliff and make it climbable once again.

And then I looked at the cliff again and I saw that the one directly opposite me was holding up an unimaginably huge model of the Eiffel Tower. Actually, just one of the legs of it stood supported by this cliff-rock and the whole giant metal structure rose so high up into the sky that I was scared to turn my head up and look because I didn't think I would actually see it.

Then they told me that there was a train that went around these different places (I wasn't sure what places they were talking about), and that if I was curious about the world I should go and see it on the train, since it goes in a loop. So I boarded the train, without difficulty, which was a relief, but as soon as I did so I realized that I had to go to work at 1 p.m. and that I had to be back at the original station by then and I kept wanting to ask the conductor if that would be at all possible, but the train was moving and I kept getting distracted by how wonderful and pretty the places we were going through looked like.

But then we arrived at one of the smallest stations and there were two very distraught women standing there and they boarded the train and demanded to know if a certain boy had been see among the passengers. I don't remember the boy's name, but the women said that he had gone to the beach with his friends and that he hadn't called back since and they were really worried about him. And everyone on the train sat in silence because we knew he was one of the one hundred and forty-four people who had been killed on the beach, but that story wasn't in the news yet so we couldn't tell the two women that their son had been shot in the head and left to be eaten by the beach scavengers.

Then the train was suddenly very empty, and I looked at my watch and realized that it was exactly 1 o'clock and I had to be at work, and I was scrambling to get off the train, even though I did not know where I was or anything, and then one of the pretty girls who worked on the train said that she would be sad if I left, because she liked and she thought that we could be good friends. Which is when I realized, also, that I didn't actually have a job to do today, I just had to make an appearance at 1 o'clock to receive my sad schedule with no times on it. So I told the girl I would call out of work and we could hang out for the day, and she said that would be very nice.

But then I woke up. And I do have to go to work at 1 pm.

Fields and fields of hopelessness

First, E. and I were lost in a big city. The city was a maze of dirty buildings and empty streets, and there were haggard, poor people everywhere. E. kept saying that we had to get to the town hall and then we would "be safe" but I told him that the people around us were clearly not dangerous. They were too downtrodden and for the most part they just wanted to keep to themselves and I was insisting that we should just find a train station and get back home. Suddenly a police car pulled up and this huge cop got out, and his uniform was all neat and his buttons were shiny and he had these bright rosy cheeks and he was like "You kids need help out of this place?" and before I could say anything E. said that yes, we did, and he put us on the roof of his car like we were on a parade float and he just started driving through buildings, and if people didn't get out of his way he would just run over them and laugh and tell us how all of these people were worthless and dirty and useless. And he took us to a train station and there were clearly people in line but he offered us to run over them so we could be first in line. So I slid off the front of the car and I ran out of the front door. On my way I grabbed a big chunk of the floor with me. I was carrying it away for safety because I couldn't take any of the people, but I thought maybe if I could save a piece of the city then it would ripple out and get rid of the evilness. Everything in this city was brown and grey and dark. There wasn't a sky. It was like we were actually inside a giant building, and the ceilings lights were off and only the lights in the city (those that worked) were on. 

Anyway I was running with this chunk of stone and it kept transforming in my hands. It kept changing into different stones, and then eventually I realized I was actually carrying a giant yellow tin can. Then my friend appeared and told me she wanted to go camping and she was going to the same campground that I had been to once before and I said I'd go with her, so we got onto her magic industrial carpet and flew along the highway and my stone kept dragging me towards the edge of the rug and I was afraid of falling off, and for some reason more and more people kept appearing on the carpet, and they all had tons of belongings with them. A girl right next to me had a brand new vacuum cleaner. It was a purple Dyson "sphere" one. 

So we got to the campground, which was this amalgam of all the campground/forest/outdoor dreams I've had in times past. And S. said that she didn't know the exact way to get to the campground, but I said I had my phone and it said we had to follow the "loop road" to the center of the forest. So I started walking down the road, and I was alone because Sonia was busy trying to organize all the other people who had come with us. I was walking past a small abandoned-looking gas station and I thought the building looked familiar so I walked towards it and then I walked behind it and the forest ended there suddenly and it was really hot and really sunny, and there was a wide tarmac platform and a fence around it, and beyond the fence there were just fields, endlessly, until the horizon, and they were all of dying "tea". The weren't tea bushes, but for some reason they were tea "grasses" and they were just withering in the sun and in the heat, and it was really captivating and beautiful and I stood there for a long time just walking along the fence and looking at the fields and a part of me somehow knew that "these were my fields". Then I noticed that there was a man in an unseasonably warm wool coat and a hat and he was sort of prowling around, he always had his back turned to me but he seemed to be trying to get closer to me. So I started to follow him and there was an old woman, too, suddenly, and I was following the man still because I thought he was my grandfather who died last year, but then I was between the man and the woman and I realized they were assassins trying to kill me for my fields. 

So I fell back and the woman and the man pulled out huge dirt-covered clubs out of the ground and said they were going to beat me to death, but I started to run away and I ran all the way back to the gas station and my friends were all there waiting for me and we pushed the giant cardboard wall down on the old man and the woman and they were crushed. And then we kept trying to walk across the road and get to the campsite. Also, the entire time there was a random blood-red shape floating in the corner of my eye. It was just a... weird geometric shape, sort of. Just floating there the whole time and not doing anything. 

Then I woke up.

I haven't dreamed in a while.

Awkwardly realized at like 9:30 that I actually have two quizzes tomorrow. But my mind's not working lately so I'm really just sitting here playing the same level of Angry Birds over and over and trying not to do anything dangerous.
Like really, fuck my classes. I should get an A for waking up in the morning at this point.

This isn't life. This is just one long painful and unbearable existence, and all I've been thinking about all day is how phrases like "taking one's life" are just... kind of bullshitty jokes. It already isn't life. There's nothing to take and nothing to lose

The Primaries are givin' me Nightmaries...

Part the First:
I was being chased through the woods by shadowy people with very explicitly evil intentions, and Daniel Radcliffe was there suddenly and he told me that he was actually a wizard, not as Harry Potter, but as himself, and he had this magical spell to make us invisible, because the evil people were chasing him, too. I didn't believe him at first, but then he threw glittery powder over us  and said that now  we were invisible. Which, you know, didn't prove anything, but dream-me was like "Oh yeah makes perfect sense, how nice of you to help me in my moment of dire need to be invisible, magical Daniel Radcliffe."
Then magical Daniel Radcliffe said we should go hide on the top of this barren hill so that we could spy on the evil people, because they wouldn't be able to see us since we were invisible. So we went up to the hill, but I was suddenly pretty certain that we were not really invisible and that the magic spell had not worked. I started to crawl back down the hill, but the evil people had seen us, so we started to run, and we tried to hide under some fallen trees, but the evil people found us anyway and we were captured.
Also, everything in this forest was a shade of blue or black, even though it wasn't night time. It was more like the middle of the day, but even the sun was blue.

Part the Second:
We were at my friend M's house, and there was a massive party going on. I was trying to figure out who everyone was, but suddenly this old woman appeared and told me I had to go to the basement right now, because I was in trouble. I went down into the basement, and it was very well furnished, except Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry were all there, as well as some disagreeable-looking women who said they were their mothers.
I told them to let me go, but they said very insulting things to me and that they wouldn't let me go until they had all won the presidential election. And I told them that this was completely ridiculous, because only one of them could win (you know, hypothetically. not in real life I hope, because that's an affront to human progress), but they said they would form a triumvirate and rule together and burn all the women who get pregnant out of wedlock at the stake as witches. They said they wouldn't let me go because I was helping the gays dismantle Christian values.
So I broke through a window and escaped out onto the street and I realized I was just a few houses down from my own house, and I started walking towards my own house, I walked past the place that had burned down a few weeks ago, and it was still on fire, except instead of fire it was people, none of whom I knew. They were crammed together into weird positions together, and every so often someone would fall out of the windows and break against the pavement and disappear. So these people told me that I had broken the window in my friend's house and I now owed her 300$ for fixing it. So I said, fine, I'll go get my checkbook and write out her stupid fucking check, as long as she stops inviting the GOP to her parties, because they are the exact opposite of good human beings.

Part the Third:
I went into my own house and it was dark. Everything was shades of red and black and orange. My housemates appeared to me one by one, and each of them confessed to me that they had somehow used my stuff in my room without permission. And then my father appeared and said that we were going back to UA because there was a huge storm on the way and we would be safer in that old building. So all of a sudden the upstairs living room jerked around and we were now in the room that is my grandparents' bedroom. For some reason, my friends and some of their obnoxious friends were there with me, and I was confused and angry, because this was supposed to be a private trip. But then I remembered about the storm, and I went to the kitchen, and my grandmother was there sitting by the table like always, except for some reason the kitchen now faced the street instead of the yard.
We looked outside together and we saw that the snow was falling in huge chunks out of the sky, and it was piling up all the way to our floor (our apartment is on the fifth floor). It was like a mountain, but luckily, my father said, it would keep the river from reaching us, because the river all the way across the city was flooding and the water was rising higher and higher, but our mound of ice and snow would protect us.
I asked my grandmother if I could go brush my teeth, and she told me to go to the "other bathroom", which was located in the room where my great-grandmother had lived (and died) back when we lived in this apartment. This bathroom consisted of an ancient gas stove, two toilets, a sink, and a bathtub. Also the walls kept shifting around and changing, and the lights flickered and it was very dark. I got dizzy and had to sit down on one of the toilets, and that's when I realized that my grandmother had actually asked me to cook dinner for everyone so I started cooking, but the stove was so old and I couldn't figure out  how it worked and all of the pots kept boiling over and the flames kept shooting up too high. Then I turned around and I saw that the light-bulbs in all the fixtures were rotting away and they were actually burning with fire instead of electricity and the tiles were getting scorched. Then I looked into the tub and it was full of water, but every time I glimpsed it after that there was less and less water and there were fishes at the bottom in the dirt, first they were tiny little goldfish, but then there were more and more of them, and they were small little fish that looked a little bit like manta rays, and they were eating each other.
I called my grandmother and she ran over and helped me extinguish the fire in the oven, and then she said, it was because I hadn't gone to the right setting in the bathroom, and she pushed a switch in the wall and the bathroom was new and shiny and perfect again.

And then I woke up.

Feet like loaves of bread.

1. Housekeeper

I was, for some reason, a housekeeper in a mansion. My job was to keep everything tidy and to stay out of the way of the family who lived there, the head of which was a disagreeable man who was a wizard. All of the rooms looked identical and they had lots of Persian carpets and old-fashioned grandfather clocks and suchlike things. I feel like there was a young daughter, maybe in her teens, whom I never saw but whose voice I heard often in the rooms I was cleaning. I would sometimes feel like I saw her out of the corner of my eye. I would see a shape that looked like a girl, and it was a very pale shade of blue. But I never actually saw her; maybe she was a ghost. 

One day the father showed up and accused me of breaking something precious in one of the rooms. He said I was fired, and that I had to leave the house. I told him I had to change into my outside clothes before I could leave, and he said "Fine, change in this room." and he made my clothes appear in a big pile on the floor, and then he walked away into a different room. I started to change into my clothes, but they kept disappearing off my body. I would put on my shirt but it would end up hanging off a chair a few seconds later when I went to pull on my pants. It was very frustrating, and then I started to feel like I was being watched, and I turned around and I saw that the old man was watching me change through a crack in the door, and he was making my clothes disappear off of me. So I got mad and pulled on a winter jacket and walked outside in just my jacket, and when I was outside I was wearing my clothes, but I was still very angry and I didn't want to go back in there, so I didn't even care that I had forgotten my wallet and my backpack in there. I told myself I would come back when he wasn't around and ask one of the other housekeepers for it.

2. Gory Elevator

I was walking down the street of the town I live in, the downtown area that's trying to be all chic and modern. Except it was a different town, that looked different, and all of the buildings were the same but they were different buildings... they had different insides. For instance, I was walking past the children's hospital but it was actually the dorm buildings of my university. So I went inside and it was the first day of the semester and we were all checking in. To celebrate, the RAs were handing out long pieces of neon-green fishnet-type fabric. They said we could tie the fabrics off at one end and make bags out of them, but most of the girls were just wearing the stuff as clothing. 

I didn't have my ID, but the RA at the door recognized me and she said that I should just sign my name in on the guest list and make a note that I need a new ID to get into the building. So I tried to sign in, but the paper was a mess and someone had signed their name in every single box. Also the sign-in sheet was a survey asking if we were going to attend the "Chocolate Party" next week. The paper was all smudged up by chocolate, too, and also by just dirt. 

After I signed in I cut myself off a long piece of the neon fishnet to use as a bag and I went on to the elevator. I hate elevators and I especially hate crowded elevators, so I saw that one was completely empty and I went for it as fast as I could, but as soon as I was inside it, about a dozen more people suddenly appeared and they were all pushing in and yelling at each other, and one boy said it was his birthday and he wanted to ride on the outside of the elevator, but nobody listened to him, because the doors were jammed and we couldn't move up. I was near the buttons so I kept pushing random buttons until finally the doors closed and we went up to the next floor to let some people off. It was still really loud and confusing, and I don't think anybody but me noticed that the boy who said it was his birthday, let's call him P. (he lived in my old dorm IRL), had squeezed himself into the space between the elevator and the door and was going to ride the rest of the way up on the outside of the elevator. 

I turned around and my friend K was there, as well as a girl I knew in highschool, whom we can call. Every time I looked at A, her face became a little bit more deformed, it bulged out and her skin looked like it was covered in severe burns. But I still recognized  her as her, and I couldn't tell if she knew what was happening to her face, so I didn't want to bring it up just in case she was sensitive about it. So the three of us all looked at each other and we all agreed that we had definitely, in fact, seen P going outside of the elevator, and we were pretty certain that he was going to die. There was a little porthole in the elevator and I tried to look out and maybe see where he was, but he was on the other side of the elevator, and all I could see was that the elevator shaft was sideways and it had been graffitied and decorated with holiday lights. 

We were moving very fast, and suddenly we stopped and we realized we had been ferried across to the second dormitory tower, and also back onto the ground floor. We walked outside and we saw that there were people screaming and crying and running around. We walked up closer and we saw that there was a huge bloodied mess of a formerly-alive human being lying in the middle of the road. Actually it might have been several people. He looked like he had been crushed and ground up between the elevator and the shaft wall, and had then fallen several stories to the ground below. We knew it was P but no one else knew who it was yet, and K said she wasn't going to deal with this shit, so she just got up and walked across the grass into our tower of the dormitory. We tried to follow her but the security guards stopped us and told us there was killer still on the loose, and that we should stay over by the dorms where it was safer. We started to walk back towards the lobby and on the way we realized that the whole sidewalk was littered with cut-off limbs, arms and legs and pieces of heads, and as we walked farther and farther on I started to tell myself that the feet looked like loaves of bread, and what a weird image that was, and how I should write it down before I forget it. 

We couldn't get back into the lobby, so we had to stand outside, and we were kind of just surrounded by this gory mess - P's crushed up body on one side and the chopped up people on the other. And I glanced over at where P's legs were lying. They were still attached together at the hips, but they were broken and jutted from each other at odd angles. And as I looked I saw that the legs were still trying to crawl, and the whole body was still trying to move, and so were the chopped up bodies beside us. So A and I decided that it was just too much and we went to sit in a closed-off little courtyard to hide from the wind that was blowing. And A's face was getting worse and worse and I had no idea what to do, I just kept repeating "Feet like loaves of bread. He's still trying to move." to myself over and over again. 

Then I woke up. 

Dreamland Wonderland

I'm not sure I remember exactly how it happened, but I somehow ended up in the strange house of my strange friends. They had a lot of children, but maybe they didn't, but I kept getting the sense that they did and that my job was to babysit their children for them. We were all packed into a very large hallway, the major part of which was taken up by a huge bed. There was a man tied to the bed, like a clown, by the hands, and he kept flailing his feet and hooting at me. I was sitting in the corner with my friend, and we were holding hands, and my boyfriend was sitting at a bar table with his friend, and they were having a beer and watching us and we were all four of us trying to have a conversation, but it was really very loud. 

Then for some reason somebody started telling us the plotline to a movie, or maybe it was an old myth, but in any case I suddenly turned into the main character, and my consciousness split into actor and audience, such that I was both acting out everything in the story but also watching it happen from some distant spot high above the action, completely detached from the story. So the story went like this:

A young lady about our age was unable to find  a man who would marry her in real life, for whatever reason. They all found her vaguely disconcerting and disturbing, even though she was pretty-looking and generally a nice person. So one day as she was sitting down in her bedroom and crying about it, a monster appeared in her room and said "You'll get married in the dream world, where you belong." The girl was terrified, and refused and screamed, but the monster laughed at her, and insisted that this was the way that it would happen. He led her out into the center of the room and made a simple arch of dried dead vines appear, just an arch, with nothing in it, and he told her that she had to pass through it in order to be married, and even though she was terrified, she did it, despite herself, and she stepped through the arch, but just like she had expected, nothing actually happened, except the monster and the arch both disappeared. So she was relieved, and thought that it had only been a dream, but then, her room began to melt all around her.

I was watching from above her room as this happened, and what happened was that she was suddenly standing on a frozen path at the very very edge of a forest made of cut planks of lacquered wood. She was wearing a white dress and yellow-mushroom-colored shoes. And in fact, all of the shadows in this world were not black or grey, but different shades of yellow and gold. And every snowflake that fell made a sound like a tiny metal bead hitting a taught drum skin. So she stood in this din and cold and over it she heard a terrifying sound, like cackling and howling, and also the shuffling of a dozen monstrous feet, and she started to run, but the monsters were already very close to her, and she ran up to a crossroads, her path cut straight into the forest but there was another path that ran parallel to the forest boundary, and at this crossroads, from all sides, came these creatures: they had very short, broad, and flat torsos, with protruding ribs and longish necks, they had animal-like hind legs and walked on their toes, and they had disproportionately long arms, muscular but lumpy, and they walked the way primates do, on their knuckles, although if they need to they can stand and walk upright for a bit. On their long necks, they had large heads with long, very pointed snouts, so they almost looked like very exaggerated Bull Terriers, but with jaws that opened wide like a snake, and they had long pointed tongues and rows of tiny super-sharp teeth. They had no eyes nor ears, and as they came closer to her she heard that the horrible sound they were making was actually a chant; they were chanting "You will get married! You will get married! You will get married!" and laughing. 

I saw them sweep over the girl and start tearing off her dress and scratching her skin, she screamed and struggled but they were too strong, but then I zoomed back into her consciousness and I looked up and saw that they had all suddenly become started by the apparition of a small child who was standing under the trunk of the nearest "tree". And the child said, I have to show the dogs their place, or they won't obey me when I am married to their master, and so I picked up the nearest one and swung him around and around and then smacked him against a tree so that his spine broke, and then all the other dog-people left me alone.

I kept moving through the forest and it became an old, decrepit house. I came to a room full of monsters, and they too tried to attack me and yelled at me about getting married. I kept on walking and got to a random secret room in which there was an old-timey pub full of human people, drinking quietly and looking scared. I tried to hide among them but then the giant snake monster-man came through the broken wall and started eating and crushing everybody to death. There was a man who had been in the pub who was dressed like a Naga, and he tried to play himself off as the real Naga's minion, but the real Naga was actually like one hundred feet long, and the fake snake-man kept slithering over him and trying to get acknowledged, but then he crawled too close to one of the Naga's poison-gas emitting pores and he fell down dead. The room filled with deadly gas and I ran off to the far side, and I saw a hole in the floor and seemed to lead into a lower corridor, white and modern, in which scared women and children were running for their lives. I started climbing through the hole, and realized that I had already been in the hallway the whole time, I had just been hiding in a pile of old firewood that someone had left. And anyway, I realized, the hole I was trying to crawl through was way too small, I couldn't even fit my head through, I would have to chop at it with an axe or something to get through to the next level.

Just as I was looking for my weapon, the parade of cards (a la "Alice in Wonderland") began, and I was terrified of them, and pressed against the wall. And just as the Ace of Hearts (ironic?) was passing by, my hand fell on the axe I had been looking for, and he saw me and immediately accused me of trying to murder him. Also the Ace of Cards became a giant head with little hearts for pupils and no irises, and he made me kneel on the ground, and he made me keep repeating falling into kneeling position until I was doing it perfectly, and the whole time I was scared to do it because I thought he was going to chop my head off with the axe, but really he was just being silly and making me do this. And so I took my axe from him and chopped through the floor and we all fell down into a pool of electric-blue water. 

And I woke up.

There was a lot more to this dream that I forgot because I woke up from it and was like "WHAT THE FUCK" and half of it left me.

Nightmare Pasta

I put these up on Tumblr initially, but I figured the official collection shouldn't go without. So here are three nightmares from the last two weeks:

St. Felicia:

We went to a place called St. Felicia’s Cathedral. And we were drinking and having a feast. But then everyone got quiet… and there was this sound… like a wailing or an organ playing or a wind howling. And I looked to the front, and there was a flash of electric sparks, or something, and it made a strange ripping noise in the air. It was a color I don’t usually see in dreams. And this woman appeared. She wasn’t solid at first, and she was crouched over, staring ahead of her. And one of the priests said “HERE IS FELICIA! HERE SHE IS!” and then she screeched and unfurled her arms and her arms reached out across the room, like 3D but horrifying, and I felt her pulling me in even though the person behind me was trying to hold me down, and I was reaching for her hand, and she was making this strange jangling dance, and her mouth was open really wide and dark, like that one creepy-pasta image of the woman in the corner or whatever. But she was moving and like… vibrating, and making this absolutely horrible noise and her hands were touching my brain. 

And I woke up ‘cause I was trying to scream but my nose is all stuffy so I made this sad moan/snort instead. Ugh it was terrible

Dream King:

There was a woman who was trying to kill herself. She was performing a very complicated ritual in which she had to do a special dance around the decomposing body of a male deer every night until there was nothing left of the deer except its bones. She had to pour a mixture of molasses and a little bit of her own blood over the animal every night, and she had to sing it a song. And then she had to take the decomposed flesh and the molasses and blood and rub it over her arms and her face and keep singing and dancing until the candles died out each morning. For some reason I was sitting there watching her and she made a little performance out of it. She wore an old flowered dress and no shoes and she sometimes stood in the chest of the deer and danced in the mush of its lungs and heart. The one night, when the skeleton was finally emerging and there was just a puddle of liquefied flesh on the altar beneath it, Dream appeared and said she had to come with him, and the show was over, and I asked why, but he just swept his cloak around the whole scene and the woman disappeared, and all I saw was his face and his twinkly eyes like stars and he said “Goodbye, now.” And then I woke up.

Lava Pit:

A friend of mine had gotten a parking ticket. And for some reason, that translated into me being sentenced to the death penalty, which was administered via suspending me by handcuffs over a pit of lava along a very slightly inclined metal beam, along which I would slide, ever so slowly, until I fell off and way down below to fiery and painful, although probably very swift, death. For some reason my handcuffs got caught on some imperfection on the metal and I was left danging at the very edge of the beam for hours and hours, and I had to claw my way back up along it and scramble against the rocks to keep from falling, in which process I broke and shredded up my fingers. Eventually I was pulled back out of the pit and I was told that they would have to try and execute me again tomorrow, however, according to the law, if I managed to survive two more times I would be pardoned and allowed to go free. 

Now, the awful and disturbing part of this dream, is that after I was released I went home for the night, and I knew, absolutely and without a doubt knew, that I would not survive the execution the next day. And I tried to have my last few couple of hours with my friends and family but for some reason everyone refused to listen to me or understand me, and it was terrifying and frustrating and agonizing. Because I was just trying to explain to everyone that I knew I was going to die, without a single bit of reserve or hope, and they just wouldn’t hear it, and all I wanted was for someone to shut up for like three seconds and listen to me and really really understand that I knew I was going to die and I knew there was no way I could stop it and I was resolved and resigned to it, and that I was thinking of it in terms of committing suicide rather than being executed, but still no body was listening, and they all had these weird distorted faces and they talked all high-pitched and discordant. 

And also the other really sick thing was that I didn’t want to keep trying to live. I’m tired and I feel hollow and heavy, like there’s a big steel cape that’s attached to the base of my neck. And as much as there was that part of me that knew I wouldn’t make, there was an equal part of me that didn’t want to. It was like… when we had to do the Pacers, back in HS gym, and I sincerely wanted to break every bone in my own body rather than have to do it, again and again. I remember, at some point, in the dream I was speaking to my father, trying to explain, and I said ‘And I have to do it tomorrow. And the next day. and the next.’ And I’m so fucking tired of it.

And really the most awful thing about that is that I woke up, and I was still thinking it. Like I woke up and I felt like it was still happening, and today was the day of the execution and I was getting up for my last two or three hours alive, and I was just indescribably furious that no one had listened, but also I was just as completely convinced that I had to die because that was what I wanted, secretly and deeply and earnestly, for the longest time, and it took me like a good half hour to really realize that I was awake and that I wasn’t going to be thrown into a pit of lava at 10:30 am. And I don’t know. Ugh. It’s doing that thing to me where I can’t feel my fingers.