Please Don’t Text Me from Beyond the Grave
Recently, whenever I wake up, the first thing I think about is how badly I want to pop open my head like a plastic Easter egg and just take my brain out. I want to throw it in the trash and start over. I have been having so many nightmares that my subconscious mind seems irreparable. I dream about missing class, being stalked, or winding up in a psychiatric institution. The most innocuous one scares me the most, though, because you’re in it.
In this dream, I wake up in my bed and my phone is buzzing. I flip it over. Above my email notifications and morning news alerts, you texted me.
“Hey,” you say. “It’s been a bit. I miss you.”
I don’t ask you where you are. I already know that you’re in the afterlife.
“I miss you too. How is it?” I ask.
“It’s okay,” you say. “Boring. Everyone’s really nice, I just don’t know anyone.”
I ask if you can visit me.
“I can’t, but I’ll text you,” you assure me.
“I want to be there with you.”
You don’t respond for a few minutes.
I send another message. “I really need to see you.”
“Stop it. You don’t mean that.”
I insist. “I do.”
“I can’t talk to you if you’re going to be like this,” you say. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“Come on,” I say.
You don’t reply.
“I’m sorry.”
You don’t reply. I am sending you text after text and I am crying onto my phone and I am scraping my knuckles on the wall and you don’t reply.
And then I wake up. I am in my dorm room and I am sweating. I cry before I realize I am going to cry.
This is my least favorite nightmare. It is the one I keep having and the one that scares me the most.
I don’t think this is a sign. I know that if you could reach out, you’d do better than this dream. I know you were only something on this Earth for a blink, and now you are nothing, nowhere.
And that is why this is also my favorite dream. For a minute I can map you in the folds of my brain, somewhere deep inside me where I can look up at the sky and believe you are there. I can believe that my person can still hear me, and wants to answer. And I can believe that you are somewhere in the ether, angry, but not bored, and in no hurry to see me there anytime soon.
