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There's a common thread that sews my dreams together - I'm constantly searching for something in them. Almost every evening, as I drift off, I'm dropped into some labyrinthine setting, and charged with the task of discovering a specific item.
I've been placed in forests with walls of trees thousands of feet high. I've been trapped in cathedral crypts, surrounded by the tombs of hundreds with no visible escape. I've been locked inside dilapidated houses in neighborhoods that don't really exist. Actually, I doubt that any of these mazelike spaces truly exist.
Despite the varied differences in these venues, all these dreams still involve a quest of sorts. I'm always on the hunt. What's possibly the most frustrating part of these dreams is I never know what I'm looking for; at least, I can't ever remember what it is I'm supposed to find. I just know that I'm meant to find it, whatever it is. The whole phenomenon has that ridiculous logic that only dreams seem to follow, and leaves me feeling completely disorientated. There's something dizzyingly confusing about it all, similar to how you feel when you're trying to dial a phone number in a dream, but you just can't seem to get the numbers right. I usually end up stumbling around, terrifyingly lost, unable to locate another living soul. I keep walking, though, until I wake up.
(I have a feeling that it's actually a person that I'm supposed to find in these convoluted places. I have a funny feeling that person is you.)
I don't know when these dreams will end - when I finally find what I'm looking for, I'd assume. I haven't run across any Minotaurs yet, and I'm glad for that; but, if I do come across one someday, I wouldn't be surprised if he wore your face.
It was three deep breaths, four months, and almost an entire bottle of wine before I could walk into Mary’s bedroom. Mary’s old bedroom. The room that used to be Mary’s. I don’t know what I should call it; I just know I don’t want to call it by any of them. It is Mary’s room.
I was away for barely three weeks. She called me, asked me to come home. She was crying about Labyrinths or something, and how they kept twisting around her mind. She was crying and I should have come home.
There were no drugs, no signs of trauma. The doctor’s talked about hallucinations. How things could appear so real, that she could have thought - -
When she was 6 years old, I bought her a diary. There were four kittens on the cover and she told me they needed someone to talk to. She had the name tag from her first day at kindergarten pasted onto the front page. Something about wanting them to remember her name – remember who was writing to them about dreams and falling stars and the last episode of Sailor Moon. Mary would curl into herself on the couch every night, writing some secret message to one of the kittens. She was only 6; she was bored with that plan long before the diary ran out of pages. I thought she’d thrown it out years ago. It took me three deep breaths, four months, and almost an entire bottle of wine before I found myself opening the diary’s last pages.
June 1, 2013
I can hear them outside the door.
I can hear them outside the door.
It’s offensive, really. I lost my mind, not my hearing. You could at least whisper the insults.
June 3, 2013
They’ve given me a nickname now.
“The Labyrinthine Mind”
Seriously, what does that even mean?
June 4, 2013
I scratched them today.
Ripped through their perfect little white uniforms with my long, pretty nails.
June 5, 2013
They have cut my nails.
June 7, 2013
I stopped screaming long enough to ask them what the nickname means.
I was told to “look it up.”
Well, certainly. I’m sure it’s a perfect description, because everything you all do is so unbelievably perfect. Why not just hand me a dictionary and maybe loosen the straitjacket while you’re at it?
It’s not like I’ll bite. Wouldn’t want them to rip my teeth out next.
June 10, 2013
Labyrinthine. Labyrinthine. Labyrinthine.
I’ve started the mantra until they tell me what it means.
June 13, 2013
They stopped my mantra to ask me a question.
“If you’re in a straitjacket, how are you writing?”
So, I bit them.
I’m hoping to keep my teeth.
June 14, 2013
I hate it here. I hate it here. I hate them.
June 15, 2013
I gave up the mantra.
They don’t even comment. I just keep getting those smiles.
Those Awful. Fake. Degrading. Tight Smiles.
These people are as clinical as the smell of chemicals and too bright lights flickering from my hallways.
June 17, 2013
We’re just trying to help you.
Just trying to help me? Help me with what?
Just more lies about how they’re just trying to uncurl the shifting mazes that used to be my mind.
But that just looks like two new pills and a white paper cut from where I’m curled on the inside,
and I Don’t Want Them.
June 20, 2013
They say I’m home. This isn’t home.
They say I’m all better now. But I’m just lost a little deeper in the labyrinth.
Mom isn’t answering her phone.
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