It's Either Ex-Boyfriends or Former Students or Dead Babies

The last two mornings I have woken up in some pretty foul moods. I haven't wanted to open my eyes, face the day, get out of bed. If I had the capability of staying in bed and watching marathons of America's Next Top Model or a string of shows about pyramids and Pharaohs on the History Channel, then I would have. But I don't have that capability--there's no satellite access in my childhood bedroom--so I have been forced to get up and do yoga. And after yoga, I eat my breakfast and then realize I have nothing else to do until everyone else gets out of work for the day.

When I first got to Buffalo, all that free time was filled with writing--since finishing my book of stories in May, I've moved on to a novel--but ever since we got back from the bachelorette party this weekend--the one that featured this cake and, the next morning, this pancake--I can't find any words that sound good, beautiful, or right, and I don't know why.

Of course, it could be the nightmares. They're back. I was having them every single night for a few weeks before I came home. I had them for the first few days I was here, too, but then they disappeared.

But last night and the night before, there they were again. In one, I gave an in-depth and quirky lesson on comma usage, only to have the class end in chaos as one of my students set her backpack up on the desk to reveal that she had stored her newborn inside and it had died during class. That's right. A newborn baby--sweet, tiny, curled into a tight ball--had died next to spare pencils and folders while I discussed reasons commas are necessary and important.

Another featured a former student who was trying to run me down. Another was populated with ex-boyfriends or ex-flings who had shown up to declare their love for me and tell me that when they had cheated on me, when they had left me for some other girl, when they had taken me for granted, when they had decided I wasn't as great as I'd once seemed, they'd been wrong, they'd been idiots, and now they needed to have me back. And then those ex-boyfriends started throwing fists and drawing blood.

I'd like for these things to go away. I don't want them to bloom into what was going on before I came back to Buffalo. Those nightmares were full of death and destruction. Members of my family were dying. My best friends were dying. I'd fallen in love--with Conan O'Brien, on two separate occasions--and he was dying (once in a hideous plane crash that I thought at first was a dramatic Hollywood stunt; I laughed when the plane sizzled into a ball of fire before eventually realizing that, no, that was no orchestrated crash and the love of my life was now dead).

I'd just really rather stay away from that all. It's not doing good things for my mood. And I don't have time for my mood to interfere with the goings-on. I have a lot of Italian food to ingest this weekend, and I don't want to go into the festival with the memory of some new death, some new terror hanging heavy around my neck.

There Is Something Very Wrong with Me

We already know I am not having the best of times in the writing department lately, but in addition to that terror, this past week I've been haunted by sex dreams every time I close my eyes. Normally, this wouldn't be a bad thing. After all, there are many people out there I would like to have sex with--people like James Franco, Bradley Whitford, and (freshly bathed) Jared Leto. But I didn't get sex dreams about James Franco, Bradley Whitford, and Jared Leto--freshly bathed or otherwise. Instead, my sex dreams this week have been about the following odd cast of characters:

1. The Janitor from Scrubs




2. Fez from That 70s Show




3. Kathie Lee Gifford




Yes, the last one is truly disturbing. And confusing. There are few people on this earth that bother me as much as Kathie Lee Gifford bothers me, but still my subconscious insists that I want to get it on with her in a big way.

Which leads me to believe that somewhere in Florida, my grandmother is squeezing oranges into a pitcher, nodding her head, and thinking, I knew it! I knew it all along!

Lesson Learned: Don't Hold Up a Sign That Says I AM DRUNK!!!!!!!!!

I am more exhausted today--my first day back in Maine after winter break--than I was when I left for Buffalo after the fall semester ended. I did a lot of running around, sure, but that was only a small part of what made me tired.

I couldn't sleep. Or, to be more precise, I could sleep, but it was an awful sleep, a sleep that was interrupted every hour by another nightmare. Each morning I would wake up feeling like I'd spent the last seven hours running instead of sleeping.

I dreamed I was fired from my job because while my students were doing oral presentations, I sat in the back of the classroom and held up a sign that said I AM DRUNK!!!!!!!!!!!

I dreamed I was waitressing, that I'd forgotten table 52's bread, that I couldn't find the kitchen to pick up my orders, that the bartender was yelling at me, that fish frys were stacking up and up and up and up and up beneath warming lamps, but I couldn't get to them.

I dreamed I was lost. I dreamed I was being chased. I dreamed there was someone in my bedroom, standing over me, watching me sleep.

I dreamed I moved into a new apartment without looking at it first, that the bathroom was green with mold, that the toilets were so backed up they spewed mountains of waste into the air, that the toilets were so backed up they'd gotten into the bathtub, that when I tried to take a shower all that came up through the drain and down from the shower head was brown, brown, brown.

I dreamed of him.

Every morning I would open my eyes and feel it immediately--the pressure, the weight of something invisible leaning down on me.

I went back to Buffalo with an awful lot of baggage from a strange semester, and I guess the nightmares, the pressure, was just my body's way of working through it, trying to make sense of the often-ugly things I slogged through for the last five months.

Even when I was awake, I was busy trying to work things out in my head. I thought I would spend a lot of time writing, but I didn't; instead, I spent a lot of time reading, and when I tired of reading I tented a book over my face so I could lie still and think while rows and rows of words pressed their tiny serifs into my skin.

I thought about what I want to accomplish in the next semester and over the summer. I thought about the girl I've become. I thought about all the heartbreak I gave and took. I thought about my students and what I could do to better teach them the things they need to know. I thought about how I want to become a better person.

And it tired me out. Still, yesterday I made the drive back to Maine--tired--but when I made it to Portsmouth, to the Piscataqua River Bridge--the midpoint of which serves as the border between New Hampshire and Maine--I suddenly felt lighter, brighter. I felt like maybe I'd made peace with some of the things that had been hanging over me as I crossed the same bridge on my way home for Christmas. And later, after I went to sleep with Abbey curled against my hip, I didn't have a single nightmare. Today I might still be tired, and I might still need a lot more sleep to catch up on all that I lost over break, but I think maybe--just maybe--I'm getting somewhere now.

Fuck You, Tornado

The night before my parents announced they were divorcing, I dreamed of tornadoes. The night before Ex-Keith revealed that he'd cheated on me, I dreamed of tornadoes. The dreams of wind, of lighting, of thunder, of the earth being sucked into the sky, come before tragedy or during tragedy.

Last night I dreamed of tornadoes. More than usual. The usual is one. One skinny, whip-like, terrible finger of wind reaching down to touch grass and water and brick. Last night, I dreamed of many.

One, two, three. They all reached down to earth and moved toward me. Fast. Unbelievably fast. The only building in which to seek shelter was a barn, and the barn was missing one of its walls. I screamed and screamed and screamed and tried to get everyone else into the barn, but I knew it was no use, the tornadoes were coming, and they wouldn't be stopped by a barn with only three walls.

Later, after the people I was hiding in the barn with got sucked into the sky, I dreamed I could no longer fit into the shower at my apartment. I hadn't gotten bigger; it had gotten smaller. It was shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. I had to shower quickly or else I wouldn't be able to get out. And the problem was I needed to be clean and I needed to be out of the shower because I was about to go to prom. Prom. And then after I escaped from the shrinking shower, I dreamed that my best friend had brought me yellow shoes to wear to prom when I had a purple dress.

And here's the thing: I'm not exactly sure if these disasters speak to the disasters that have already come or the disasters that are ahead. It's that second possibility that scares me. An awful lot.

Which One Are You Again?

When I was in high school, there was a certain boy in my life--a certain boy I liked quite a bit, even though I probably shouldn't have because my loving him brought about enough drama to saturate my life for the next six years--and that certain boy was a twin.

I have never ever, never once, met his twin, which is probably a good thing. Every time there was a possibility I might run into this boy when he was with his brother, I was seized by a panic that clutched me at the back of my throat. Would I be able to tell them apart? Would I say something stupid to the boy who wasn't the boy I loved? And what if I ran into them when they weren't together? That would be even worse. Would I see the twin and confuse him with my boy? Would I be snubbed and get angry for no reason? Would I whisper one of our inside joke on my way by and be rebuffed? Would I stop and carry on a conversation with him for five minutes only to find out I was talking to someone who thought I was a lunatic, a crazy girl who was trying to hit on him in the produce aisle of the grocery store?

It made me very, very nervous, and I dreaded getting mixed up in an incident with the twin. I had nightmares about the twin. I dreamt that I was accidentally kissing the twin when I wanted to be kissing my boy or that I was lost in a foreign country--so lost I was panicked and crying and certain I was two seconds from being abducted and locked in some windowless cell, where I would be tortured by political rebels who were bored and antsy and looking for someone to poke with a stick--and then the I saw a familiar face across the crowded bazaar. I started screaming the boy's name, but he wouldn't turn around. And when I got up in his face and started yelling at him, telling him, Please! You've got to help me! I'm so glad to see you! I'm so glad to see a familiar face! the twin just stared at me blankly, eventually walking away and leaving me alone and a target for torture.

I'm not going to lie: I occasionally still have those dreams. I might have had one this week.

But I know why. I know why I'm suddenly being haunted by the twin again. It's easy to understand, of course. It's simple.

I've got twins in one of my classes this semester.

I didn't recognize this immediately. On the first day, I made it through almost the entire class period without seeing two identical faces staring up at me. It wasn't until I was matching my roster up with the attendance list I'd circulated that I realized I had two guys with the same last name. "Hey, do I have brothers in this class?" I asked. All the students were busy preparing a self-reflection about their writing, and so when I looked up, the only two students looking up at me were the two I was speaking about. And that's when I realized it. Twins. Twins staring back at me, smiling.

"We're twins!" one of them said.

"Oh God," I said. "I am so screwed."

The class laughed, but I widened my eyes and examined their faces for something--anything that stood out as a difference. Nothing.

"No, really," I said. "I'm bad at names at the beginning of a semester anyway. With you guys, I'm thinking it might be a mess pretty much all semester."

"It's okay," one of them said. "Our mother gets us confused all the time."

Well, yeah. It wouldn't be hard to do that. The parents, in their infinite wisdom, decided to do that cutesy thing parents of twins have the habit of doing: they named them both with very similar names that start with the same letter. I guarantee that when those boys were little they worse matching sailor outfits. I'd bet anything on it.

And it turns out that they're not that far removed from wearing matching outfits these days either. The last time class met, the twins showed up to class and sat in their usual seats--they have the decency to sit with a friend in between them, so it's not twin overload--and I was all set and ready to make a conscious effort to learn one from the other, but my attempts were thwarted by the fact that both boys were wearing the exact same shirt.

One came up to ask me something before class started, and I needed to look something up on the syllabus in order to answer him, so he went back to his desk while I flipped through for the information I needed. When I looked back up and in his direction, I realized I had no idea which one had been standing in front of me a few seconds before. I looked at their faces--sweet, round, expectant--and sighed. "Guys, I'm sorry, but I have no idea which one of you was just up here," I said.

That night I went home and fell asleep to dream about my old boy and his twin, about me making a fool out of myself in front of nearly everyone in the world--which, of course, is what worries me the most about twins. I hate to appear stupid or slow or confused. I like to appear to have all the answers--every last one--at every minute, every hour, every day. I realize this is silly, that of course no one has all the answers every minute, every hour, every day, but these twins and their matching faces and shirts are seriously going to cramp the anal retentive must-appear-to-be-in-the-know-no-matter-what thing that has hung over me since my first twins, since the first time I dreamed of the twins, a dream where I was pregnant and picking out a loaf of French bread and my father dragged one of the boys over to me--the wrong one, as it turns out--and said, "ARE YOU THE BASTARD WHO IMPREGNATED MY DAUGHTER?" and the poor twin looked at my father like he was crazy and said, "I have no idea who your daughter even is." And you can bet my father gave me quite the talking-to then.

A Total Waste of Marshmallows

Thursday night I took a sleeping pill before I went to bed. I was already tired because I hadn't slept the night before, but I wasn't taking any chances. I wanted to be in prime shape for the First Annual Pink Torpedoes Drunken BBQ, and I knew the chances of that happening after a ten hour drive--especially after an awful night of sleep--were slim. And that's I swallowed that pill and yawned myself into dreams.

Once there, I dreamed of my grandfather. He didn't want to admit he was an old man, a sick man, a man riddled with disease after disease after disease. I was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor of a house I'd never seen before, and my grandfather was there, too. It was rumored he'd killed a young woman--maybe a nurse--who told him he had diabetes and that he needed to watch himself. I was there to confront him.

"Face it, Grandpa!" I yelled. "YOU ARE SICK! YOU ARE OLD! YOU ARE AN OLD, SICK MAN AND YOU CAN'T HURT PEOPLE WHO ARE TRYING TO HELP YOU!"

"That's not true!" my grandfather bellowed. "That's not true at all! You're a liar! You're a horrible, lying girl!"

He dashed off. I could hear him in the room next door. He thrashed around, rummaging and rummaging and rummaging. When he came back into the room, his arms were stacked high with marshmallows. There were bags and bags of full-sized marshmallows. He tore into one of the bags and started throwing them at me. He threw them one at a time, but he threw hard. He pelted me with marshmallows, and I screamed and bobbed, tried to shield myself from his attack.

"STOP IT!" I screamed.

"I DO NOT HAVE DIABETES!" he said, and he threw an entire bag at me. Then he stuffed several marshmallows in his mouth and dashed around the room. He ran circles around me and yanked open the front of his shirt. "I AM FINE!" he shouted. "YOU ARE A HORRIBLE GIRL! A LIAR! YOU ARE A LIAR!"

And then I woke up.

Ew-rotic

For a certain period last week I was unable to move my neck and shoulders, due in part to some sort of stress-induced problem with my occipital. I found out my problems stemmed from that region in my neck when I made an emergency appointment with a massage therapist recommended by one of my students who, after seeing me writhing in pain during our three hour night class said, "You know, there's this really great day spa in town." I perked up, took note, and made an appointment two days later when I no longer could back out of a parking spot without disintegrating into tears because my neck would just not move.

Before I could be massaged, though, I had to fill out paperwork. I had to provide information on family health history, on allergies, on known afflictions, on sexual health, on stress levels. There were some blank lines underneath the question Why did you come in today? I wrote, I've been getting headaches. Bad, bad headaches. This underneath the question that asked me to rank my stress level, the question that had me circling a seven out of ten and thinking, That's being generous.

After the massage therapist--a kind, wonderful, magic-handed woman--was done with me, she gave me a careful once-over. "No wonder you've been getting headaches," she said. "A girl your age and size should not be carrying that much in her shoulders. Your occipital just wouldn't let go, no matter what I did. We're going to have to re-train it to relax. It's going to take awhile." She wanted to know if I'd been under any ridiculous amounts of stress lately. When I told her I'd just moved, just started a new job, just left all my friends and family behind, she nodded and said, "Yeah, that'll do it."

Oh, it did it alright.

She told me to sit still and relax. Then she disappeared for a few moments. I slipped back into my clothes and slumped into a chair, wishing that the massage had been a cure-all. It was clear it hadn't done what I'd hoped it would. My neck was just as stiff as it had been when I went in. The rest of my body was in pure bliss--my feet and calves especially--but my neck was still aching.

When my massage therapist reappeared, she was holding a giant goblet of water. "Here," she said. "Drink this."

I drank. I wasn't very thirsty, but I drank it anyway.

"You're going to need to drink a ton of water tonight," she said. "Loads and loads of water, okay? If you don't, you'll feel like hell tomorrow. You'll feel like you woke up with the worst flu you've ever known."

"How come?" I asked. I'd gotten massages before, but no one had made a big deal about drinking so much water.

"Trust me," she said. "I just released so many toxins that were caught up in those coiled muscles, you'll just get re-clogged if you don't filter it all out. Please tell me you're going to drink a lot of water."

I said sure, I was going to drink a lot of water. And I did just what I said I was going to do: I went home and poured myself glass after glass after glass after glass. I was sick of drinking water, but I kept on. I had things to accomplish that weekend, and I couldn't wake up the next morning feeling like a bowling pin had fallen on my head during the night.

But, sadly, that's exactly how I woke up feeling. Maybe I didn't drink enough water. Maybe when my massage therapist said, Drink water, she really meant, Funnel water until 2 AM and pray that was enough.

My God, that Saturday morning was ugly. I tried to get up. I really did. But there was nothing in the world that would've been able to motivate me to leave my very nice, very expensive bed. I spent the day feverish. I spent the day tossing and turning. I spent the day producing noises that were of the type likely to come out of an impaled cow. I wanted nothing to do with food, with polite society, with the stack of papers and quizzes I had to grade.

Eventually, I got better. It was not Saturday, Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday, but eventually I came out of the painful, toxin-clogged cloud I lived in post-massage. But I didn't leave the cloud unscathed. During my feverish nights, I was caught up in strange dreams. Dreams of the sort that had me waking up the next day and thinking, What the fuck was that all about?

The worst of these dreams featured one of my best boys from grad school, who was, at different points in the dream, played by himself, by Danny Devito, and by my friend Becky's Packers-loving husband.

This dream also featured my boyfriend, The Boy from Work, and a gaggle of horny, perverted cops.

It was an intricate dream, but the major plot thrust was this: my grad school friend had teamed up with my boyfriend, and they'd pulled off some major caper, something fiendish and foul and bad, something that had the cops hot on their tails. Eventually, when the cops caught up to them, the head cop--a saucy girl with the mouth of a sailor--demanded that to pay their debt to society by having sex with each other.

Yes, yes, that's right--I dreamed that my boyfriend and friend from grad school were forced to have sex with each other as they stood in the middle of a kitchen so the girl cop could watch.

And then a set of male cops came up the back stairs and made me take my pants off and parade around wearing only fishnet and pink panties. Later in the dream, when I caught a glance of myself in a mirror, I saw that I had the hairiest butt in the history of the world. I was positively monkey-like.

And that's when I woke up, the view of the monkey-fur tangled in fishnets still hanging in my mind. I was sweating. I was disoriented. I felt like I might throw up, like my head might explode, like my neck might snap at the base and send my skull tumbling into the fireplace.

I tugged my hair out of my face, tried to breathe and find my way back to a world where I wasn't half ape, where my boyfriend wasn't making love to a guy who likes to discuss his at-work bowel movements, where some cop wasn't saying, You think you can be dirty boys? Let's see how dirty you really are!

If someone would've told me it was going to be like that, I would've gone to drastic measures to stop it. I would've scoured the internet for an at-home IV kit that I could load with water, water that would pump through my veins all night long, cleansing all the stuff I had loaded inside me, all the weird toxic gunk that came gushing up into my brain at the same time and sent me spinning into murky, murky worlds for a stretch of four days.

I'm still sore, of course. I'm going to need to go to the chiropractor soon. I'm going to need someone to put my shoulders and neck and head back the way it used to be. I can only imagine what might spill out when they next crack me open.