Prose by Amelie de Jesus

Edited by Emily Ferguson

I still wake up from dreams about the summer.

They’re intense. Surreal. Star-studded, in more ways than one; faces I’ve loved—idolized—throughout my life, melting into caricatures of themselves puppeteered by my hindbrain. 

It’s a sick marionette show. 

I spend more time missing people than I do actually knowing them. I don’t want to list examples. Some of them are so pathetic I won’t even admit them to myself. Some are wounds too raw to aggravate. (Although I do. Pick at flesh flayed open ‘til it’s bleeding, oozing sickness, rot—) Yet I see them in my dreams—always my dreams—and they’re…Unbidden. Not exactly unwelcome. 

In my dreams I take them for granted. In my dreams they slot back into their places in my life, the negative spaces they once occupied, and it’s as easy as anything. It feels so right that I don’t take the time to marvel at it. Her easy smile, his joking look… But it’s been too long, I’ll never have it back, and now I have no right to it at all. All I have are memories of those weeks, those months of my life. Months. An amount of stolen time that measures up to less than a year, I couldn’t have a year with them, and now—

I’m always leaving something, these days. I stayed in three different places over the summer alone. Narrowly avoided a fourth. I left pieces of myself everywhere, miasma in forgotten corners, hammering home the lesson: pack light. Of course I’m grateful for those who took me in, but one gets tunnel vision when the focus is survival. So. Carry everything you really need on your person; make it to the morning. Carve out hours of sleep when you have to, where you have to, and—

Dream about the summer.

Or something else, most nights. You think I’d  have been more surprised, but I wasn’t, not really. You grow accustomed to losing when you’re this well practiced at it. You get used to it, even when you think you never will. 

And sometimes you wake up without realizing you’ve changed, that you’ve become the kind of person who survives this type of stuff. I swear I never wanted to toughen up. But a fox in a snare will chew off its leg; no softer version of myself would have made it to today. In the time since, I’ve learned a few things. Like: you don’t become yourself again. You never get the liberty of recognizing the person looking back at you in the mirror. 

I’m not sure how long I can keep doing this. I want to rewrite the stories to be about us. I want to be anywhere else but here, under these fluorescent lights, reading about salvation. What does it mean, to be saved? To let God dissolve beneath your tongue?  Some people, myself among them, will never learn what repentance tastes like. My skin is stapled to my skeleton, my soul—if it exists—is soldered to my miswired heart. Still I tug at the seams. Try to separate the body from the self. 

I know why I started in this game, or at least I used to. (Maybe… I think. I hope I did.) It’s not a waking dream, but it’s something like it, the way my eyes cloud over and I’m in that room again, their voices in my ear. I’d call it a flashback if I wasn’t scared of what that might mean. What does it mean that I can’t sleep through the night? Midnight. One o’clock. Two. I’m in the car for twice as long, chasing the moon while it’s closest to the earth, pretending I’m not running. Pretending I’m not being chased.

I don’t have it in me to be a person who’s remembered. I’m as alive as I know how to be, believe me. Besides, they—the ones who are still here, anyway—all tell me they’ll kill me if I do anything to change that. So what’s left is my foot on the gas and the tremor in my hands: I’m alive.

Some of us can’t ask for any more than that.