When I was younger I had reoccurring dreams in black & white: I was being chased by strange men, sometimes seen or simply assumed within the dreamscape, and I would find myself in a setting not too dissimilar from a nice Manhattan neighborhood, an empty street lined with picturesque brownstones. Running, I would choose a home, whose thick wood door would brighten to a deep candy red, and begin pounding. Screaming for my life, the dream ends when I realize no one is going to answer the door.
The reoccurring dreams somehow stopped when I hit early adulthood, not long after I experienced my first string of deaths, leavings, betrayals. Nowadays, I have dreams of waking up to my apartment filled with potted plants, trees, vines plucking themselves out of the drywall. I think they are unimaginably peaceful. But upon closer inspection, the plants are rotted brown and dying and I am filled with an immense sense of loss. I begin to cry from hopelessness. Nowadays there is no rape scene in my nightmares, no men without faces, no bright red doors. I suppose, sooner or later, I found tangible things to fear in my waking hours. I found real men who beat on women, real inescapability, real distrust, what real red looks like.
But when there is enough loss to go around– in death, through life, metaphorically, physically– sometimes you cry to think that even the plants are dying all around you.
nonsex. 