When I Was Young I Always Had the Same Nightmare

When I was young, I always had the same nightmare.

I was my neighbor, running on the top of our apartment complex, jumping off and flying to the ground. I always woke up before I hit the pavement- but that's a natural thing, right? I've heard that if you actually hit the bottom, you wake up dead.

It happened when I was six. I really don't have any memories before then. My mother says that nothing really happened before then, and the death of our neighbor, my friend, was such a monumental thing- she's not surprised that I don't remember anything before then. His name was Erik, and he was nine. Three years older than me. He lived in the single room flat next to ours. He didn't have a kitchen like us, he didn't have his own room like I did.

He would come over almost every day. We'd eat lunch and talk about how we liked it when it rained. It helped him sleep at night, he told me. It was one of the few things he found comfort in.

We lived on the top floor- the twelfth. The building was sparsely populated; most of the inhabitants had low income jobs. My mother told me later; when I asked about it, that the electricity would occasionally turn off because of neighbors neglecting their electric bills. A fluke in the building's wiring I suppose, as our bills were always paid.

When I was young, I always had the same nightmare.

It started out that I'd just wake up in a cold sweat-- I couldn't remember what had just taken place in my head, or why my temple was pounding and my shirt was sticking to my back. Sometimes I would wake up screaming; that always alarmed my mother. My screams weren't long and withdrawn like a normal kid's, they were short and intense, like I was gasping for air.

When I was eight years old I was asked by the second grade teacher to draw a memory I had. I started to draw what I had for lunch. The teacher saw me doing this and inquired. "Not like that! A memory is something you remember from a long time ago!"

But I didn't remember anything from a long time ago. I just drew a picture of me and a dog and told the class that I had a dog named Susie when I was four. But I didn't. I knew absolutely nothing about my life before I moved into the suburbs. I asked my mom what had happened, and she just told me that I wasn't happy. When I got even older, closer to entering the realm of adolescence, she finally told me about Erik. It didn't make a big impression on me, since I didn't even remember who Erik was, but the suicide shocked me as it would shock any twelve year old. I didn't understand why anybody would want to kill themselves. Why anybody would want to stop existing.

At only twelve years old I didn't start asking why I had to do my homework, I started asking why I had to live.

The more I thought about it, the less bizarre it seemed. Mother had told me that Erik was poor and his family situation was fairly painful- it's possible he had been abused, and his mother had a different man in the apartment almost nightly. But still, to commit suicide at only nine years old is a really strange thing.

I turned sixteen and was a sophomore in high school. My grades started to slip, I didn't have any friends, and my mom lost her job. We moved back into the apartment we had lived in before Erik's accident, but of course I didn't recognize anything. I could tell it was really hard for my mom, because she cried the first night we were there. I'm not sure if she was crying because of what had happened, or the casual memories that the building recalled. We were on the twelfth floor again.

It was about a week after we moved back into the apartment that I first heard my mother come in, excessively drunk, laughing. I heard a mans laugh too. At first I was happy, happy that my mother had finally gotten over the death of my father. But she wasn't. I walked into her room the next morning and there was blood on the sheets. I didn't know what it was from, but it wasn't important. When I got home from school that day she was sitting at our card-table-cum-kitchen-table crying. I pretended not to notice and walked to my room.

Shutting the door, I hopped into my bed with dirty sheets and closed my eyes. I'd rub my eyes real hard until I'd start to see splotches of color and a sea of deep crimson red. If I twitched my eyes (while they were still shut) the designs would dance. Sometimes I could heard music in my head, the dots and lines choreographed perfectly, spinning and shifting and floating across the underside of my eyelids. I never really bothered to do anything else.

The drunken laughter and bloodied sheets became common. I turned seventeen and nothing really changed. Sometimes while I would be lying in my bed I would think about Erik, think about how strange it had to have been to make that kind of decision. What was he thinking as he jumped? Did he hesitate? Did he change his mind at the last minute?

On my eighteenth birthday, I bought a gun. I never bought any bullets, but I hid it under my bed and slept on it every night while listening to my mom fuck her latest trick in the next room. One night I took the gun to the roof of the complex and threw it off the edge. I watched it fall to the ground and crack into a hundred pieces. Nobody noticed. Nobody even turned a light on and looked outside.

I closed my eyes and started spinning around in place. I would spin and jump, as if somehow I could raise enough momentum to lift myself off the ground and float. That's what I wanted. I wanted to float. Nobody would notice if I failed, if I broke into a hundred pieces. Nobody would turn the light on and look out their window. I climbed onto the edge of the roof and closed my eyes. I started spinning slowly, counting the rotations. When I got to five, I jumped.

When I was young, I always had the same nightmare.

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SPRING2006

when i was young i always had the same nightmare