#4 A bad man twice

 I keep having dreams. 

It takes me hours to fall asleep and when I do, he is there. He's in the corner of my eye or with his back to me, but here is there, inching closer. Sometimes there is fear, and fights and all of the nights that I remember. So loud it all is. Sometimes he is just there. 

Last night he was happy, last night we had sex. 

I am scared. Not at first though. I wake up constantly in the night, but never with a start. Never clammy or shaking, never afraid or frightened, or crying. Never the way I think I would wake up after these kinds of dreams. It is as if I vaguely become aware that I am awake and slowly I realize I am staring at my ceiling through the mosquito net I tuck carefully around me at bedtime. It dawns on me I am in this world now and I am still breathing and I lay like that for a long while. I feel sticky in the feeling that I might be loosing my mind. I'm still not afraid; I just idly wonder what is wrong with me. I breathe a tragic little sigh and roll over or close my eyes. 

I have taken to wandering through the house at these times. Making my way through the stone corridor in the dark, I almost feel as if I am looking for something, but I don't know what. I stare at the heavy, bolted door, protected by sacks of coal, told to us because, "We are only women here." Without a man of the house we are vulnerable, to what; I haven't been told. From my years outside these doors I know enough. The world will do terrible things to little girls. The coal sacks seem like saviors really.

 Nonetheless, I think for what my mind puts upon itself, for the knowledge that a man of the house can be just as dangerous as a man outside the house, nothing seems a better remedy than taking a seat on the cool stone steps. Taking air into my lungs to remind me that I am alive. Not that I feel depressed, or panicked or sick. I don't feel anything at all really. I suppose that's how I know something is very wrong. 

When I loved him, I felt like I was put on earth to do nothing but love him. I felt as if the tug of my heart to his pulled me, no, dragged me from the still, dirty waters I have floated in alone for so long. It was so easy to slip into a shell of myself and become his shadow, his tagalong, his footnote. Now I don't love him anymore, I don't miss him, I don't care, but I am back in the murky waters. What am I, really? 

Zo says that the stillness of this place is making me subconsciously address what I have run away from; that after six months of getting on with my life, I, actually, haven't moved at all. I thought I had left it all dead and far behind, yet here on the other side of the world where everything is different and everyone is new, it found me. I see him and I hear him and I feel him bearing over me, drunk and yelling and angry. My breath catches somewhere between my lungs and my throat. I thought I had locked him away tightly in a box that I would never have to open, except for like, admin. Clearly, I was wrong. He sneaks out, seeps out, in the twilight hours where everything is dark and there is nothing to hear but my own heartbeat in my ears. 

They said it might happen, with the Doxy. Standard side effects, plus strange, vivid dreams. In the beginning it was fantastic, like a superpower. Everything was vibrant, fantastical. I was dreaming in technicolor. It was the most enjoyable, most intense and most stimulating side effect of any pharmaceutical I've ever had to take, but it's different now. 

I hope my brain adapts to the Doxy. I hope my mind returns to leaving the past where it is and my dreams just dreams. I hope I wake in the morning easy, with a slow flutter of eyelids and a yawn I feel through my whole body, rested. Not like the skeleton I am now, roaming through the corridors in this house and the file cabinets in my memory, restless, disturbed. I refuse to be shaken, broken, or bruised again, by the shoulders or by the subconscious. I refuse to loose myself to a bad man twice.