I bought a red satin pillowcase. I’d rather have had silk, but it’s hard to find silk in southeast Idaho. I thought a silk pillowcase would help my night dreams improve.
The night dreams are about essays I can’t write. My writing stops in the middle of the scene. Actually, it’s not the writing; it’s getting honest and staying honest. Some things I just can’t turn and face full on yet. I want to dress them up. I don’t want to say to myself or others that reality can get so dark that we break under it.
Like what?
Like watching a judge sentence my beautiful daughter to prison for her repeated failure to stop self medication, like how she turned and looked at me to save her from the handcuffs, and like how the wooden bench felt as I dug my fingernails into it from watching them lead her away. I looked around the courtroom and noticed a detective smiling and remember how it felt to want to claw off his lips and feed them to my dog. I remember the I-cannot-stop-what-will-happen-to-her gagging me, restricting my breathing until I felt like I could pick up the bench in front of me and heave it at the judge, hoping it would crush him, crush time moving on, crush the mistakes I had made, crush the marriage that had consumed me with its problems, always stealing time from my children, like how I still sat and stared at the door they closed behind her through two more court cases, feeling buried as if whole cities had fallen on my head—I can’t write about this yet.
Or another dream about how it felt to look at a dead husband who had lain down behind a car and sucked in gas fumes, the night before, until he drifted off and out of his body. The suicide note he left in the front seat of the car seemed like an afterthought:
“I love you, Shar. And I know you love me, but my heart hurts too much.” I can’t remember what the rest of the note said, even though I still have it, hidden away, with other sacred notes, in my home.
We had to walk across a dirty red carpet to the back room of a Salt Lake City mortuary. I floated between two friends and my sister. My father sat in a car outside. He’d tried to get out of the car. I saw him grab the door handle, but he slumped back in his seat, and said “I’ll wait here; you won’t need me. I did not know if I was sad or glad that he waited in the car. I remember feeling surprised when I realized he was a coward, but I didn’t have time to justify it, to help him back on his pedestal.
I almost pulled my sister out of the car. Why couldn’t she see we needed to hurry? I did not creep up the steps of the Mortuary like my sister did. I pushed open the door quickly, still sure that I could stop whatever grotesque process was in play. I could still grab the one round rock before it rolled into an avalanche that would bury me and my children.
The worried mortician did not want us to see the body. He walked ahead of us into a stark rectangle room with a desk at one end. Mustard paint flaked off the walls in one high corner.
This—I cannot write about yet either. But I want to. I grow closer. I want to grab all of it and form it into words and place it on paper, so it’s not chaffing at my heart, always at night, in countless endless dreams.
