“There were eucalyptus trees on the side of the highway, trees that I had thought, in the dark of night, were black shadows of the apocalypse.”
I am prone to fear, to being scared, to screaming at the slightest unexpected movement. A few days ago, I was brushing my teeth and B hid under the bed without my knowing, watched from on his belly as my blue painted toenails walked around the apartment trying to find him, until I finally got close enough for him to reach a hand out. I screamed as loudly as if not his arm but a rattlesnake had appeared. For as long as I can remember this easy fear has been the case. My brother used to jump scare me all the time. All he had to do was just turn around quickly and I would scream. My roommate in New York used to shock me simply by her presence in our shared home. On the phone the other day she told me that once I knocked and came into her room and then startled at her presence. You were in MY room, she said, laughing.
My fear, like most fears, gets larger at night. This makes me just like most people. In the shadow, the world reorders itself into something unknown. The medication I take for anxiety (for fear, you could say) makes me remember my dreams more. I’ve wondered if it makes me dream more or just thins the membrane between my sleep brain and my waking brain. Mostly, I have nightmares, but not the horror monsters and killers of my childhood nightmares. These are what I call “adult nightmares.” An ex shows up at my house to profess he still loves me but then leaves a sausage maker and a container of crude oil in my yard and somehow I know that is a horrible time bomb of a gift. Someone tells me my clothes are too big to fit in any woman’s closet. I am being raped and I am the one raping and the people I am flitting between are myself and an ex. An ex this, an ex that. Once I had a dream that someone lit the tops of his fingers on fire with a cigarette. He tried to blow them out as if he had realized his mistake upon doing it, but they sparked and sparked and eventually his whole body caught on fire. I asked are you ok and told him I love you and he asked can the villain hear you? I said, what villain? you lit your own hands on fire. A spider climbed my arm and all I could do was hold it in my palm. It was brown and white spotted and I could not kill it, no matter how hard I tried. A dream de-mystifying website tells me spiders in dreams mean a fear of being trapped in life or in a web of lies. There is no entry for someone you love lighting their fingertips on fire.
If I now have fear dreams about real people I know, I used to have them about movies, specifically one movie. Years ago, when I was fifteen, I went to Jackson Hole, WY to visit my uncle and cousins. My aunt had died a few years earlier and I went out to help out at a summer camp my cousins were attending. The room I was staying in at their house had a TV in it, a luxury I had not ever been allowed at home. That first night, under this borrowed quilt in a house I had only visited one other time, I turned on the television. WeTV was just starting Unfaithful, a 2002 film starring Richard Gere, Diane Lane, and Olivier Martinez and I dropped the remote, transfixed. The story tracks Diane Lane’s affair with a French man she meets when she falls and scrapes her knees. It’s categorized an erotic thriller because what happens next is that her husband, Gere, finds out about the affair and then kills Martinez with a snow globe to the head. He rolls him up in carpet and puts his body in a landfill. At first, it was everything I could want from a movie: it was showing late at night, there was sex (and with a European man!) and there was enough sidelong glances from Diane Lane to make things seem dramatic and romantic. At that time, and maybe still now sometimes, those two words are synonymous to me.
As the movie continued, interrupted irregularly by commercials, I became paralyzed in my bed. Every bit of light coming in through the blinds was a car driving by with someone inside coming to kill me for some transgression. Imagine being so scared by something so silly. But is it silly? What’s actually scary about the movie is how careless and random the affair is, how mad it drives the husband, how quickly things go from fine, happy even, to murder. For years I worried about the murder scene. I couldn’t forget Richard Gere rolling Olivier Martinez up in a sumptuous carpet before he got rid of the body. I always identified more with Olivier than Richard, assuming, I guess correctly, that I was far more likely to be the interloper than the settled one. How quickly love can turn to death. How quickly B can turn into someone scary. How quickly a re-ordering of normal people, daily events, normal objects can become my nightmares.
Sometimes, at night, when the closet door is closed in B’s room but the light is still on, it creates a yellow outline of light. The first time I noticed it, I said it was beautiful. B said, it’s scary! Immediately both of us clammed up in fear. We laugh about that moment all the time for how ridiculous we were being, but I also think about it a lot. The way the glow from a single bulb could become fear or beauty just because of how we decided to name it. Eucalyptus or shadow of the apocalypse?
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