The Dream

Every day I pace circles around this box, my muscles tightened knots bearing heavy, invisible weights. Twenty paces from one end to the other, I wear a tight, tidy circle on the floor with my daily rounds. The tap, tap, tap of my feet and the rush of my breath are the only noises in the place. Like a freshly caged tiger, I wonder why I am here; what I did wrong; where my companions are. As it is, this claustrophobic box is my home, and solitude is my only friend.

The golden-brown wood floor creaks beneath my feet as I walk. I have a thin, black rubber mat that I use for yoga, exercise, and stretches to keep my mind and body sharp, but I cannot make my shoulders relax down from around my ears. I am coiled like a snake for reasons I cannot explain. My body is sick and tired of bracing for a storm that never comes. I want to break something, but this room is devoid of anything worth breaking. I pace and I stretch to keep those desires at bay. If I give in to the anger, I might be lost forever.

I used to be productive, have a job, be somebody. A working mom with a day planner and a mission, I used to wish I had more time to do all the activities that society demands to be done. Now, I have nothing but time - time to lose count of my circuits around the room. Time to feel the crushing weight of failure with every breath – I hate how it grabs me around the chest and squeezes until my ribs feel as if they might crack. The pulsating pressure forces all the air out of my lungs, and I desperately strain for every dribble of air I can gasp. We never think about breathing until it no longer comes easy.

“I am my own worst enemy,” I think wryly to myself as I heave on the floor.

I cannot even consider the work world now. I panic even thinking about pressure. I desperately try to slow my breathing, to get the panic attack under control. My flank and chest muscles spasm sharply. I struggle not to gasp, continuing to focus on rhythmic breathing. One, two, three, I breathe, deliberately slowing my intake down. Eventually, I get my body back under control and stare absentmindedly at the ceiling as my heart rate slows back to normal.

“Oh, if only I could feel safe and warm again,” I wish.

These panic-ridden episodes happen regularly now. And so, I walk, to open my lungs, to outrun the feelings of failure, in search of something I lost. I try to refocus my mind on a different subject, people I used to know. I brush my hand absentmindedly along the cold brick wall as I walk. They never call. They never write. The common denominator is me, of course. I am sure that the problem is me. Still, when I drop off the face of the earth, one would think they would check in. I had friends from church and from work, or so I thought. I had family, a husband, and a child. Am I that easy to forget? Or did I offend them in some way? I search my memories for every miscue, every potentially offensive utterance, but I come up empty. Do they think they are better than me? Holier than thou, maybe? Were they just using me until I became no longer useful? Sometimes, I think I hate them. The anger flares again, and I feel a sort of distorted, painful static in my brain.

“They can all just kiss off, as far as I’m concerned,” I think, as my head threatens to explode. I feel broken, or maybe just lonely.

Through the fog of pain and alienation, I try to remember how I got put in this box, left to this endless pacing. There was a time before the sky fell, a time when I had a life out there. I think I was whole then, or at least I felt whole for a while.

The woman wore silver bracelets on her arms and flowers in her long brown hair. Her gap-toothed grin, like Lauren Hutton, was infectious, and she had a wicked sense of humor. Brilliant, quick-witted, and utterly overlooked in our small town, my mother was my idol, a saint. Her music was my favorite, a safe space for us both. The stars would dance when she played the piano in our home on Almond Street. She could burn the sorrow from anyone’s eyes, set the streetlights on fire, and send souls soaring to the heavens. Ever humble, my mother would never acknowledge this, but her gift was a sacred, healing tonic that I have never come across since. Whenever either one of us felt sad, angry, or had some other emotion we could not explain, she would play, and everything felt better.

We were closer than most mothers and daughters. My father disappeared when I was young. A steel-eyed drifter, family life was never for him. He treated both of us with scorn, but she was always my shelter from the storm. With her behind me, I was fearless. Top of my class in high school and college, scholarships to graduate school, multiple job offers, everything I ever wanted I got with ease. She was my ballast in rough seas, a safety net I did not realize I needed until it was gone.

Life without a father was hard. We struggled financially. I got bullied at school for not having a dad. As I got older, I became angry at him for not being interested in me, not wanting to be part of my life. I know it was rough on her when I was a teenager, manically bouncing between floods of tears and chaotic rages over his failures as a father. He had the world inside his hands, but he threw it all away. He was the first and most powerful rejection I have ever experienced. I suppose I have never gotten over it.

Somehow, my mother always knew how to smooth my rough edges. She knew what my father’s absence had cost me, and she alone could fix it. Miraculously, she summoned the love of two parents and poured it all into me. Whenever I felt everything was hopeless and forlorn, she was there to remind me otherwise. When my soul was black with anger and a thirst for revenge, she was there to remind me to forgive. With her music and her beautiful heart, she would draw me in and turn back the clock to a time when I felt safe and innocent. Only a mother has magic like that.

She left suddenly in spring, like a needle scraping jaggedly across a record, painful and unexpected. Her music dissolved in pools of shadow. My daughter was only four, and suddenly, I was out of tune with the world. Left with black feathers and dead roses and a weight I cannot shake, I lost everything – my innocence, my family, myself. Now I lag a step behind, out of time, trapped in a box I cannot escape. The melody is interrupted.

I walk and walk, but I cannot find her or the music. The tension is constant and cannot be quieted. My body aches from the heaviness that I cannot unload, can never put down. I feel like a ghost dragging Marley’s chains of inestimable weight in endless circles around this place. The darkness presses in closer every day telling me terrible things in my own voice. I will never be safe again. I will never be sane. I will always be broken inside. I will always be emotionally lame. I long for my mother and the shelter only she could provide. I am utterly exposed in an unrelenting emotional typhoon, and I am drowning.

I can feel myself starting to hyperventilate again. I try to slow my breathing. One, two, three. One, two, three. Focus on the counting. Focus on breathing slowly and deeply. Focus on walking. One foot in front of the other. Forget that pain in your flank. Forget that tightening knot in your chest. Forget the volcano waiting to blow.

A million miles of walking and maybe I will hit a wall. Maybe I will exhaust myself and forget enough so that I can relax. Right now, I feel I am teetering on the edge, walking a tightrope about to fall off into some bottomless unknown. I walk until my feet are blistered and my calf muscles ache. I walk through fatigue and hunger. I walk until I collapse on the hardwood floor.

The orderlies rush in. They had been watching me and my relentless circles with concern through the window.

“Leave me lying here,” I shout. “I don’t wanna go.”

The healing I had been searching for, walking for, is nowhere to be found. Nothing changes in here. She left me, and I fell into darkness. I cannot march out of that darkness on my own, no matter how hard I try.

Despite my thrashing and protesting, the orderlies manage to pick me up and strap me to my cot. They are large men, and I have lost quite a bit of weight from all the walking. Sometimes I forget to eat too. I scream at them to leave me alone. The nurse walks in with a large syringe of something the doctor ordered for me. I hate that stuff; it makes me sleep. I dream when I sleep.

Last time they gave it to me, I saw her again. The dream was beautiful. Her hair was long and brown, like when she was young. She grinned at me and beckoned me over to the piano. I sat beside her as she played the Themes from Ice Castles and Romeo and Juliet. I felt weightless, transcendent. She was glowing, like I remembered her, and I hugged her with all my might. If it was possible to say everything I wanted to tell her since she left with my body, then that hug would have said it. I held onto her like that all night. When she finished playing, she gently stroked my hair the way she used to when I was ill or sad. No one has ever touched me with such tenderness before or since. I wanted to stay there forever. The medicine wore off before I got the chance to say goodbye.

I would rather walk every day until I die than have her ripped from me repeatedly. I do not want to sleep. I do not want to dream. I do not want to remember.

I pitch and roll my body on the cot in a futile attempt to avoid the nurse. My muscles go rigid as she forcibly injects me with the substance I consider to be poison. A blankness rolls over my mind like a heavy curtain of fog and beyond that awaits the dream. I begin to hear the music again, and I start to weep.