In My Dreams She is Always Angry [Writer's Journal]

I had a dream about her again, and in my dreams she is almost always angry. The first dream I can remember I must've been younger than 5 years old. Our family had a dog named Amber that liked to bolt out of the front door and we'd often have to drive around the neighborhood searching for her. She never really liked me to pet her, although I never understood why. In the dream Amber bit her. She became deranged and diseased, a violent thing, someone I didn't understand. She was once human but now she lived in the wild, with wild things, and wouldn't come back home.

I crawled through trash to find her living in a stitched world of lawns and tents, where she sat cross-legged animal eyed in the dark and growled when she saw me. The dreams have not stopped since. Sometimes she is a demon, and sometimes she is ravaged by disease with button holes of pus across her face and she is a tornado of a being. I am always trying to run away from her. I climb out of windows, and through sewers, and through the flaps of tents, and jump into the cars of strangers, and onto planes to different countries.

In these dreams Robert does not exist, and I am always flooded with relief that I am safe upon awakening.

Last night she said, "I am angry at you!" She was hissing like a cat. The darkness always balloons around her face and in those moments of the unwashed dream the universe collapses and nothing else comes into existence - like a stageplay. Like a stageplay on a stage that floats in hell. Everything has its own dramatic lighting that twists and distorts consciousness, forces all methods of awareness onto the mutations happening in front of me. And I grabbed her by the shoulders and I said, "No you're not angry at me. You're angry at this world, for it failing to live up to your expectations. You're angry at the whole fucking side-show of being alive. You're angry at your parents, and for what they did to you, and you're angry that everything you wanted didn't seem to mean a fucking thing to the people that were supposed to care about you but you're not mad AT ME."

I used to just cry and scream, reduced to friction, a human blubber machine. I didn't cry this time.

And in my dream I saw her eyes open the whole machinery grinding to a halt and for once, I was given the thing I wanted the most, the thing I begged and craved for my whole life, the thing I so obstinately believed was possible and the reason I stayed for so long.

In my dream: She listened. I saw the anger leave at the sigh of epiphany. The recognition flooded into her eyes like a born-age vision of a hallelujah that could never exist upon awakening. But that's okay, because I know what it means here. Inside my head.

I never once asked her why she was hurting. Why she was screaming. I never once said, "I am listening to you." I never fully understand how she must have felt unappreciated and unloved. I know it wasn't my responsibility to do those things or take care of her. I was a child. But I understand now. I don't forgive, but I understand, that rage and pain are toxic entities that are its own physical matter and that does not disappear like anything in this world, but changes form as it traverses through fists, scraped nails, and birth canals.

I understand that just because she didn't understand doesn't mean I'm doomed forever. I just have to pick up the slack, open up new windows to new passageways that have long been choked by dust and littered with tiny devils that stacked pins in my brains and scraped at my spine with their easy lies. I must learn what she wasn't able to learn, understand, no, it isn't ~you~ I'm angry at, it's this whole fucking sideshow. It's the bleeding of a wound that I've let bleed for too long, down into the twin rivers below me, so that I could have the satisfaction of hurting forever. Well, I refuse now. I'll sew it up with my own teeth and dental floss if I have to.

I won't cry in these dreams anymore.

Maybe this is what progress means.