Friday, December 1, 2017

I

always remember my dreams. My dreams are normally about being at school and hanging out with friends. Around the holidays I dream about the pearly blue Audi my daddy bought me, and the Elle magazine covers of models arriving at my front door step to hand me their latest fashion lines and share with me secrets about their boob enhancements and butt implants. I did have a dream once that my Kindergarten crush Julian had grown up to be a major league baseball player and asked me on a date only to cheat on me minutes later another girl on my very own kitchen table while I was baking him baseball themed cookies. Bizarre I know, but I also had drowning dreams a lot as well, which I think stems back to the time I almost died swimming out to the beach in Nice, France, when an undertow was pulling me out to sea and I was losing my battle to swim back to shore. I nearly exhausted myself, sinking under the water several times, before my daddy's friend Tom Jablonsky swam out to give me plastic fins (real lifesavers if you never tried them) and I hugged him with my short twig-sized eight-year-old arms with shaken tears and wobbly legs.

My dream during the bay house surgery was pure silence. Imagine laying in a massage chair, in an empty room, ten feet underground, with a blindfold over your eyes to turn your entire vision black. You're in the dark and you suddenly feel a man's hand shove a sock in your mouth and punch it down your throat, as you wriggle and salivate and fail to scream because the only thing you can do is overextend your gaping jaw. Two smelly fingers plug your nose, and the next thing you know is it's like you're drowning under the water again under the bullying waves off the shore of Nice, France. But no one's there to save you as the water washes over you like you're in an infinite fishbowl. The water just keeps drifting over you every time you spasm and try to swim your way up. You drink in your death. And finally submit, into the dark as the air that gives you life in your lungs, escapes you to the surface to find its freedom. You die, losing it all as the ocean counts your weight on a scale, and anchors you down.