Forgive me. I drown every night.

Sometimes, you are standing in line at a grocery store.

You are standing there reading the magazine headlines because the magazine racks are right in front of your eyes and there is nowhere else to look and so you stand there reading the covers of tabloid magazines you care nothing about and you read gossip headlines you care nothing about and you read little blurbs about celebrities you care nothing about and you just stand there looking at all of these racks of magazines and you are depressed by all of these things and so you stop looking at those magazines and you look at the floor instead and you look at your shoes and you look at the shoes of everyone else against the scuff-marked tiles and you are depressed by all of these things so you just close your eyes for a  few seconds and listen to the beep, beep, beep of the cash register and you listen to the low drone of the conveyer belt moving forward and you are depressed by all of these things and so you open your eyes again and look at the woman standing in line behind you and you see that she is also looking back and forth between the depressing magazines and the depressing floor and you don’t mean to stare at her but you do.

You stare at her.

And you don’t mean to keep staring at her but there is nowhere else to look besides the depressing floor and the depressing racks of magazines, so you just keep looking at her and you know you should stop looking at her but your eyes are very, very tired and they don’t want to keep sweeping over this depressing scenery. They just want to rest here, for a minute. Just for a minute, they want to rest. Your eyes. They hurt. They are heavy and tired.

Because.

Because your dreams are bad ones. Very bad ones. And you cannot sleep because of this or maybe you just don’t want to. Sleep. Maybe you just do not want to sleep because falling asleep means that you will have to go back there. Back into those bad, bad dreams that always begin with you trapped in an attic.

You’ve had them forever. The attic dreams. You are locked up there in the attic and you are surrounded by ghosts. You cannot see them, but you can hear them. And they are awful, awful and they slither up the walls and they scream and bang on every door and they destroy everything in your house. Everything. You cannot see them but you can hear them and there is nothing you can do about it, there is nothing you can do to stop them, so you just have to listen to them as they rip everything apart and you have to listen as they break all the windows and as they make the light bulbs explode in their sockets and you have to listen as they crush through the walls and smash the water pipes. You listen to all of this. The shattering glass. The walls falling. The pipes bursting. You have to listen because you are locked in the attic and there is absolutely nowhere to run.

Nowhere.

So.

You have to listen. Listen to everything breaking. Listen to the wreckage. You have to listen to the water that runs and runs out of the broken pipes and pours and pours onto the ground, warping the floorboards, flooding the staircase below you. Flooding absolutely everything. Rising.

And you listen.

You are in the attic and you are locked inside and it won’t stop. The crashing water.

It rises and rises.  

It rises over everything in your house, the furniture and the heirloom cabinets full of heirloom dishes. It rises. It swallows the stair case. It seeps into the attic. It starts to pool all around you.

You watch it rise. You watch the water.

Your mind says: Swim.

But you don’t. You do not swim. You close your eyes and you listen. You listen to the water rise. It reaches your neck. And you listen. Your mind says: Swim. Your heart says: No. Forgive me.

Your mind says: Swim.

And your mind and heart go back and forth like this: Swim. Forgive me. Swim. Forgive me. And the water rises and rises.

Forgive me.

Swim.

But you don’t. Swim. Because you don’t care, really. About what happens to you. You do not care. About yourself. At all. And maybe that is sad. Maybe it is. Maybe that’s the whole point of the dream: You should swim. You should find a way out. Maybe that’s the dream’s message: You should swim through the wreckage. You should care about yourself. But. You cannot make yourself. Care about yourself. You just can’t.  

So.

You listen instead. You listen to the water rising and you do not swim and you listen to the ghosts breaking everything. And they are awful, awful. Those ghosts.

And this is why you cannot sleep. This is why. You don’t want to go back into that house. You don’t want to go back into that attic.

So.

Your eyes. They hurt.

You are standing in line at a grocery store.

You are standing in line and you are looking at the woman who stands behind you and your eyes are tired and they hurt and they don’t want to move. They just want to rest for a minute. And so you stare at the woman behind you in line and you cannot move your eyes away. Because. Your eyes. They are tired, tired.

She feels you looking at her. She feels you looking at her and she lifts her eyes from the depressing magazines and the depressing floor and she looks right at you and your eyes lock for two seconds. Longer. Three seconds. And then four.

And you panic.

Because you didn’t mean to stare. You really didn’t. But you are. You are staring. And you think: Sorry. Because you are sorry for staring. You are sorry and you cannot explain to her how tired your eyes are and how they fell on her and didn’t have the strength to move away from her. What would you say? My dreams are full of awful ghosts. Forgive me. I drown every night. What would you say? Forgive me. My eyes are very tired and they just got stuck. But you don’t say any of these things, you just look at her and you think: Sorry.

And then you feel a sharp pain behind your eyes because tears are forming there and tears are sharp.

Tears are sharp and sometimes they come at the strangest times.

For instance, sometimes those sharp tears start to form behind your eyes when you are simply standing in line at a grocery store. And it’s strange and you feel embarrassed by this so you finally look away and blink a few times to make your eyes refocus and stop tearing up because there is no reason for tears right now. No reason at all. You’re just standing in line. And the woman behind you looks at the magazines again, but really she is still looking at you from the corner of her eye and you know this because you can feel her eyes on you in the same way that she felt your eyes on her and you think: Sorry. Sorry.

Sorrysorrysorry.

You look at the floor again. You look at the floor and you think: Sorry. You look at the magazines and you think: Sorry. You look at the shoes of the woman behind you and you can still feel her eyes on you and you think: Sorry. You think: Forgive me.

And those sharp tears start to form again. They make your eyes hurt even more and you think: Sorry.

Because you are. You are sorry about everything. 

Sorrysorrysorry.