Boogeyman
When I was a girl I dreamed of war. The dream war went on and on, and that it took away my daddy, my brother, my husband and my cousins. In my dream, I knew I would never be happy again.
Today, that never-be-happy feeling is back.
Sometimes I can beat it back- shove it down while I enjoy a movie, or let is slide to the side while I walk the dog, breathing deeply the earthy leaf smell of fall. But it is always there. Like movement in my peripheral vision, like a foggy goblin lurking. The whole world feels like that darkened bedroom where I bunched my blankets up on the bed so the alligators couldn’t use the trailing edges to pull themselves up. The whole world feels like the yawning emptiness of my dream, where the holes left by my dead let the cold in. Where the holes left by my dead left me naked.
I don’t like my bedroom tonight. It feels cold and dusty, like the room my sister and I once shared on Uncle David’s farm. That room was small, with two shuddering windows, but tall. The ceiling was so far away it seemed anything could happen in the space between the scratchy warmth of our quilt and that faraway wood. The door to the room was tall, too, and it had a metal doorknob with bumpy carvings that felt rusty on my small hand. Below the doorknob was keyhole. When my cousin, Maria, watched television in the common room outside our door, the light came through the keyhole, projecting an upside-down copy of the show on our flaking wallpaper. I tried to watch these shows when they were on because it took my mind off the skittering sounds in the ceiling and the drafty cold breath of monsters breathing softly on my cheeks. But upside-down black and white television characters stretching tall and misshapen on that high, high wall were almost as scary as the monsters I couldn’t see.
Tonight when I go into my adult bedroom, made messy by a weekend of closet cleaning, I wish for Maria’s quiet TV outside my door. The cold night air gusts the gauze curtains, and I hear a woman on the sidewalk yelling at her dog. Two dusty closet doors are spread eagle on the floor beside fat trash bags bursting with clothes for the Salvation Army. This room feels abandoned, and I don’t want to sleep here.
I return to the living room and curl up on the couch. My husband taps quietly on the keyboard, and I don’t need a keyhole to see the familiar pictures on his computer monitor. He may not chase away the boogeyman with a magic sword, but he always makes time to tuck me into bed, and he stays until I fall asleep if I ask him to.
