There are reasons for recurring dreams, he says. My therapist. He holds the keys to the inside of my head, but he won’t use them. He expects me to manage this alone, with the butter knife I use as a screwdriver. The only tool I ever had.
He lists the reasons—anxiety due to unmet needs, difficulties with transitions, with relationships, with unresolved grief. I imagine a sheet of paper with these words and I check all the boxes. A bucket full of trauma that appears to be nothing more than water sloshing over the sides to most people when they look at this good life I’ve lived, this privileged life, this rent fabric, this bleeding gaping wound which won’t stop coloring my dreams all the colors of red—vermilion, rust; crimson, ruby and scarlet.
I am often not myself in my dreams, I say and then there is the long, awkward pause, while we both wait for me to figure out what to say next. I see him clench his jaw, stifling a yawn, crossing his legs the other way. What do you think is driving these dreams, he says.
I cut my foot once, I say; I dropped a huge jar and a shard of glass lodged in between the metatarsals. Didn’t feel a thing, until I noticed the warmth of the blood pooling, dark and viscous and sticky, like chocolate syrup beneath my callouses against the wood floor. Did you know you had to get stitches in the first eight hours?
The questions I’d asked—is this serious? should I go to a doctor? am I worthy of care, of attention? were the same questions I’d been asking my whole life—when I split my knee helping a friend and her dad move a mirror into the back of a truck, when I got knocked-up at eighteen and didn’t have the wherewithal to face it, when I walked through every single day feeling like a collar strangled my throat, silencing me, making each breath a shallow sip. It never occurred to me to ask for help. I gave my baby away. I bought butterfly bandages. I strung my heart together with a broken needle, some twine and old thread.
What might happen if you asked for help, he says. He touches his iPad to check the time. I feel like a squirmy five-year-old.
Do you believe in past lives? I say. Maybe the old me is trying to tell this me what the fuck I’m supposed to do. Again with the silence, the implacable look. The outside door opens and closes as the next person arrives.
I would feel vulnerable, I say.
What does vulnerability look like? he says.
Maybe next time I’ll tell him about the dream where I can’t talk, where I’m forever searching for my child, my lost doppelgänger on the street, trying to call out for her but my breath is an explosion in red, trapped inside my lungs. I slip my sandals back on. I rub the faint, perfect half-moon of a scar across the top of my right metatarsals.
Like a dream, I say.
Mollie McLean is currently writing in what used to be Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Barren (forthcoming) and two of Pamela Des Barres’ books on writing memoir. She is occasionally on Bluesky as @pennypriddy and if you know where she found this handle she will buy you a coke.
The Disappointed Housewife 