I had a dream recently. In the dream, I woke up from a night I could not recall. I didn’t know why I couldn’t remember or what had happened. I had a feeling that I had done irreparable things.
When I woke up, my head was aching, and I couldn’t see out of my right eye. I checked my phone. Several missed calls and a text from Chris:
“You ate all the cake!”
“What?”
“You ate all the cake!”
“My head is killing me and I cannot see right.”
“That’s what you get for eating all the cake!”
He went on to tell me that I better talk to Kristina, she seemed pretty pissed off at me. (I knew who Kristina was in the dream, but I do not know her in real life. Kristina painted intricate works on paper with these organic colorful shapes and collaged images of people and animals from very old print advertisements.) Down in the lobby, I saw Kristina coming out of the elevator. I approached her but she kept walking. I told her I heard she was pissed off at me. She kept walking. Finally, I said “please, what did I do? I really do not remember.”
She stopped, turned to me, and explained that last night I had taken nearly all of her paintings and tore them into pieces in front of her, one by one. She was yelling at me, “what are you doing?” “why are you doing this?” “stop it, stop it!” But I didn’t stop. I just continued to tear up the paintings, tossing them on the ground. As she was telling me this, foggy images of what she was describing emerged from the emptiness of my memory. Grey, out-of-focus, and hazy visions of my actions.
As hazy at it was, it was clear to me that I had done these things. As she walked off, I knew I would never see her again.
I went to the mirror in my bathroom. My right eyeball was damaged; sunken, misshapen, and a weird color. There was no blood or bandages, just my damaged right eye. I recalled a feeling I had many years ago. I was looking for something in a dark corner of my basement. It was near the gardening stuff and when I bent down, my head went right down onto a gardening stake. One of those metal poles that were coated in green plastic to hold up tomato and cucumber vines in the summer. The stake hit me directly at the eye socket. I sprung back up and put both hands over my eye. I thought I was blinded. I thought how careless I was. I thought how quickly things can change. I was very scared.
Feeling around with my hands, I realized, luckily, that the stake hit my skull a half an inch above my eyeball. I was shaken. I felt odd. Quezy. I felt vulnerable.
“It is all fun and games until someone loses an eye.”
