Demons of Imagining

Demons of Imagining 

4/03/2020: Midnight

My therapist said I should keep a diary, as if writing down things I would rather forget would help me sleep. I really wasn’t sure that she was worth the $500 I spent every week, but I was just so tired all the time. Even my boss has started to notice and he didn’t notice that Sharron from accounting had a chronic stapler theft problem until the day she quit and tried to pack up some twenty company staplers with her personal effects.

Honestly though who needed twenty staplers? And they weren’t even good staplers, they were just…I don’t know. They whole thing felt to me like this here exercise, one done in futility.

So I guess this is the part where I write down everything I already know, I mean this journal is just for me so what does it matter? Everything I could write here is just something that already rattles around my brain. It’s the very thing that…

I should say haunts my nightmares.

That sounds stupid, this is stupid.

4/08/2020: 2am

           Okay so apparently I have been doing this wrong. I am supposed to be recording the nightmares so that my rational brain can reason them out on paper. I am supposed to be writing it down so that I know it isn’t real and that it can’t hurt me.

Only they totally could.

Tonight as I lay staring at the glaring blue numbers of my alarm clock willing my eyes to close I thought about this. I mean, as humans we needed to sleep. Like we spent, what was it? A third of our lives just sleeping and when we slept our brains played tag with random bits of information and imaginings piecing the two together so that we would experience some entertainment as we lay there frozen and trapped inside our own heads. Now if we didn’t sleep our judgment was impaired, we made stupid mistakes.

I made one today.

A really, really stupid mistake. I was lucky really and my hands still shook when I thought about it. I’d been driving. You know, it’s the same drive every day. There to work and there back home. I hadn’t really been paying attention like I should have.

I know stupid…

There had been a kid in the road. God, just a kid like five years old running after a loose ball just like all those stupid commercials warning you not to drive drunk or text on your phone.

I stopped, but it was close. Too close. His mother’s scream still echoed in my head as I write this.

It’s dark now, I’m afraid.

4/17/2020: 11:34pm



           I haven’t actually plucked up the courage to write down what happens in the nightmares. To face them here where I’d have to physically write the words that describe my demons, where I could look at them with waking eyes and know that I have given them a presence in life willingly.

Maybe I was falling for the rhetoric my therapist was selling.

Alright I’ll give it a go.

They always start and I’m running, being chased. By what really depends on the day. Last night it was a shadow through a hallway with endless locked doors. I just kept running and running until suddenly the hallway stopped and he was there.

My gut reaction was always the same.

I had loved him…he would stay with me.

Only he didn’t. Not when it really mattered.

Yeah, it was as I originally thought. This was stupid. Writing it down didn’t give me some power of my own brain, it just made me angry.

4/20/2020: 2:12am

I guess I should start at the beginning. I was a happy child, full of imagination and dreams like any other. I had two parents who both loved me very much and tried not to show my sister or me how much they fought with each other. When they both finally admitted that they were better friends than lovers they divorced and live went on like normal. School week with Mom, weekends with Dad. Everyone thinks that I must have had this terrible childhood, after all nightmares are a child’s problem.

Children wake up screaming and moms and dads rush in and tell them that it wasn’t real and that everything was alright now.

I met him in college. I was in marketing and he was in engineering, match made in heaven I know. We were so different, but he had this…I guess you could call it an aura if you believed in that sort of thing. He had this presence that made every head in the room turn towards him when he entered and when he spoke everyone listened.

Like actually listened and not just pretended to listen. The thing was that what he had to say was interesting. He would talk about trips he had taken to coral reefs or to see famous architectural marvels. He always had a story to tell and I always fell into them.

4/28/2020: 1:39am

I guess that it can be said that only the people you truly love can hurt you. After all who else matters? It’s not like Sharron from accounting or my boss ever saw my soul. Sure we could laugh and be friends, but there was always this layer of stone between us. It was only natural I guess. After all we all knew what a…you know…a broken heart could be.

This one had been really bad.

He was there again. He actually had the nerve to smile at me and like a sap I fell for it. The shadow had caught me and had dragged me into the darkness. I felt like I was choking, like I couldn’t breathe.

God.

It was horrible.

I tried to call out to him…but he only smiled at me.

5/5/2020: 2:00am

My therapist told me it was perfectly natural to have nightmares after what happened to me. She told me that time would heal all wounds and that I was in control of my own destiny.

I was sure she wasn’t worth the money now.

I could have read that in any number of self-help books. I told myself that a million times a day. I told myself that when I woke up, when I got in my car, when I sat down at my desk and logged onto my computer. I told myself that I was in control so many times the words floated around my brain like oxygen.

During the day it worked.

I could focus on my work. I could laugh and I could smile.

I could pretend.

But there was no hiding in the dark, there was no one I could smile for or any work I could submerge myself into. It was just me and my demons.

I’d tried the pills, my nightmares had laughed at those and now I just took them out of habit.

My sister didn’t understand. She would just tell me to get over it. She is the older sister, four years older than me. She had been married and divorced, their one kid spent weekdays with Mom and weekends with Dad. She’d told me once that my life was perfect. That I had nothing to complain about.

We didn’t speak very much anymore.

5/12/2020: 3:50am

           We used to go out to coffee after class, it was this little café that only survived because it was within walking distance of a college campus and every year there came in a new group of wide-eyed dreamers who hadn’t yet learned how good bitterly flavored water could taste when you’ve been up half the night studying. His family had money, but he wasn’t some arrogant prick that thought he was better than everyone else.

I fell in love with him.

It wasn’t like the movies where there was this one look shared between us and sparks exploded everywhere. It was more like we were hanging out one day and I realized that I wanted him like I wanted to eat around lunch time. It was a low, background kind of need, easy enough to ignore at first, but slowly it grows until it is all consuming.

I knew he felt it too. I could read the hunger in his eyes when we spoke.

Yet I let myself go on starving.

5/21/2020: 1:30am

The first time we kissed had kind of been a mistake. We had been studying with a group of friends and as the night dragged on into morning we gave up trying and started a game of truth or dare.

Stupid I know. You can guess how that turned out.

After that night things got weird between us. After all we were completely wrong for each other. He was the strikingly handsome son of a senator who had traveled half the world and had the rest sitting right in front of him. I was no one from a family of no ones just trying to do my stint and get through college so that I could work for the next fifty years paying off a debt society told me I needed to succeed in life.

We tried to stay away from each other, but that didn’t really work. He was a star and I was caught in his orbit.

I saw him again tonight, in my dream. He looked just like he did the last time I’d seen him. That stupid smile was still on his face. I had tried to scream at him, to tell him everything, but a wind had come to snatch my voice.

I couldn’t breathe.

5/30/2020: 12:12am

           I couldn’t breathe… I couldn’t breathe. It was that moment of sheer animalistic panic that said either you find some oxygen right now or you are going to die. I remembered how that felt, how my chest had burned, how everything had felt so sharply detailed. I remembered how loud the blood pounding past my ears had been.

This time the nightmare had been different. I had been sitting in his car, the radio was playing the song. The one it had played when…

I had tried to get out, but the door was locked. I wanted to scream, but I needed the air. He was smiling at me. He was sitting in the driver’s seat smiling at me as I desperately tried the door. The water started to pour out from between his teeth. I slammed my body against the door, but it was too late.

It was always too late.

6/05/2020: 3:45am

He died smiling.

Just stupidly grinning like he was the happiest man in the whole, wide world. I had just agreed to marry him.

In some twisted sort of way I looked forward to the nightmares, there I would see him again. There I could see him smile.

6/12/2020: 4:00am

           It had been raining, really hard. So hard that the only way you knew you were on the road was by the flashes of white that past by denoting the dividing line. It was dark, every other headlight blinding. He had been driving, but I had sat beside him my hands clenched over the armrests, staring intently out the window as if by sheer willpower I would be able to see through the storm.

Then he had asked me. To marry him that is. I mean how unromantic could he get. Here we were driving back from some really boring lecture on the value of notetaking in the engineering field. He had been required to for class, and I’d gone because I really couldn’t tell him no. It wasn’t exactly the sunset beach walk to the little bench covered in rose petals I’d imagined as a child.

I’d said something really stupid like asking him if he was sure and he had laughed. Of course he was sure. He was sure of everything in his life.

His smile had always been contagious. I remembered how my cheeks had started to hurt from grinning. I had been so happy.

It all happened in ten minutes.

Senseless I know, the things you remember without meaning too. Like how the second point of the presenters PowerPoint had been to write very important information on both the top and the bottom of your notes. That way you always looked at it twice.

That truck driver didn’t look at all.

The trial proved that, but it was too late.

6/14/2020: 2:15am

           It had been his current favorite song. He changed his mind every few days, but this song had held him for the past two weeks. He had reached over to turn it up and I screamed, but it was already too late.

I’d felt weightless for a moment before everything came into a painfully sharp focus. The car had screamed, the guardrail had groaned, but the worst sound was the sound of the twisted hunk of metal hitting the water.

He was still smiling, but the light had gone out of his eyes.

I don’t want to do this anymore. This was stupid anyway writing all this down. What did it matter anyway? I knew what happened, I knew how the icy water filled the car, I knew how I had lost my mind and left him there when I finally freed my door. I knew how the police told me it had been too late already, how he had been dead before we hit the water.

I knew it all already. It didn’t change anything writing it down. Scratching it into paper, the words that wrapped around my heart like barbed wire.

I hadn’t been fast enough, strong enough, smart enough, loud enough…I hadn’t been...

Enough. I was in control. I was the master of my own destiny and all that other self-help book stuff.

6/17/2020: 4:17am

           After a few months people forgot. I wished I could too. Perhaps that had been my fatal mistake, because the nightmares had started then.

Maybe I’d been trying too hard to be happy and to pretend that everything was alright that my brain, infinite in its wisdom had to remind me.

I had not been alright.

I loved him and sometimes I felt like I couldn’t breathe knowing that he didn’t. Sometimes I felt like I was running and running and getting nowhere. Sometimes I felt like my real nightmare was when I was awake.

6/27/2020: 7:00am

I made it through the night. Maybe there was something to this after all, who would have thought? I felt good today. I could see the sun already shining through my blinds. It promised to be beautiful.

I wasn’t alright, but I was starting to be alright with that.

I looked at his photo this morning.

I loved to see his smile.