Though I’d hoped to say to my parents, in some wimpy grown-boy type of way, how this morning I’m feeling vaguely miserable— I realize when I arrive upstairs that there’s no one to speak with. The house is empty.
My brother’s working in Chicago, my sister flew to Las Vegas with her boyfriend yesterday, and my parents, I’d assume, are out walking the lake.
They’ll probably be back in a few hours, so in the meantime I make my toast and coffee, sit at the kitchen table, and zone out. A practice that has become ritual at this point. “Dining & detaching,” I’ll call it.
I’ve never required much to feel far-removed like this, and our back-garden at dawn, perimetered by a big window dripping with rain, provides the perfect scrim for my dissociation. The view allows me to impose my wanderings onto something close and helps me take my mind away from the dizziness I’ve felt since waking up this morning. I’m soothing my nausea for a couple more minutes by staring at wet leaves, drooping white roses, and backyard things—
Not to sideline, but backyards in the rain, for me, have either been complete fiction or totally haunting. Possessed to a certain degree and weirdly mausoleum-like.
Gazing into our garden at our black bench— with its wrought-iron grape bunches, rusted ivy twirls, and flowery decals— I notice that it seems, however unassuming, definitively cursed. The dead trees, too, drenched and crooked, feel trapped in time, and the fountain at the center of it all, spurting water from the mouth of a moss-eaten lion, looks permanently eerie even in the daylight.
I rarely go in there because I prefer to remain distantly intrigued and frightened by it from the safety of our second-story kitchen nook…
Although I’d much prefer to continue ogling at the garden, my breakfast trance is cut short by a sudden bout of vertigo, so I make my way over to a bottle of Nyquil which sits reliably next to the home phone. I’m semi-sure I’ve got the flu, so it’s probably a useless cure, but I measure out a mini-cup of it anyway— down it and then swipe my tongue across my gum-line. Lick away the residual slicks of medicine still latching on and welcome in support from microscopic sleep chemicals and acetaminophen.
I immediately follow suit with a potent shot of my dad’s Listerine, which, as I’ve realized, is such an absurd method for desensitizing taste. I’ve always found that strange, actually— how we tend to remedy bitterness with even more bitterness.
How a tequila shot is succeeded by a bite into a lime or how I’ve learned to subdue my sister’s sour attitude by responding to her with an even worse one; how that silences her and seems to level the playing field for the moment. Neither of these are cures, of course. Just more immediate methods of pacifying something awful.
Mean stuns rude, acid squashes burn, and vomiting eases nausea.
Speaking of… another queasy wave of nausea hits me, so I sprint downstairs to the bathroom and discover, consequently, that regurgitated Nyquil & strawberry jam looks sort of like a plum that’s been gutted by a shotgun. A mulberry-colored murder in the toilet bowl that I immediately flush away. Then, after a few seconds of recovery, I return upstairs to fish around my parents’ medicine cabinet for a new corrective… rifling through old band-aid’s, crinkled tubes of toothpaste, and the fragile nothing of dead cabinet-spiders until my hand finally settles on a near-empty packet of painkillers. It’s a leftover prescription from my tonsil surgery last year, which was a hellish experience, by the way—
The recovery period after my tonsillectomy was a week spent bouncing between various states of consciousness while simultaneously suffering through horrid throat pain, which in retrospect, felt as though the statue of liberty was jamming her torch in and out of my esophagus for a full seven days, punching against my Adam’s apple and scraping over my stitches.
Giving in to my appetite that week was somewhat masochistic, too, because every morsel of food, however restorative, was companioned by a swallow on par with deep-throating a spiked club.
Before the operation, the doctor had warned me that tonsillectomies are notorious for their extraordinarily finicky and difficult to cope with healing process. It’s elective surgery, but at the time I didn’t care. In regards to my pain tolerance I’ve always carried a lot of confidence, so I assumed I could muster through the discomfort— but my incisions ruptured twice that week from stretching my mouth in silent screams of pain and the memory of it now only feeds my current misery…
I really do feel miserable today. And feeling miserable is, intrinsically, a spiraling condition. Almost anti-gravity despite its droopy, skull-dumping gloom. If that makes any sense. I think it’s safe to assume that sadness is an emotion that carries particular weight, but misery for me is a bit like floating. It’s floating within unhappiness, I’d say… and by nature, things that float can be unpredictable, so misery’s got this pinch of screwball to it— it makes me go from lounging to hurling; from comfy to restless; from laying, absolutely drained on the bed, to suddenly bawling against the toilet seat.
But as I’m standing in the bathroom right now, coping with the suspense that comes with being sick, dealing with the potential energy of my miserable-ness, I suddenly remember how much the painkillers in my hand had helped me previously. So I ditch a replacement dose of Nyquil and pinch out one of the white pills.
I figure it’s the quickest route to tranquility. Not to mention, it’ll knock me out for a couple of hours and I’ll be able to fast-forward through the initial phase of whatever illness this is. Skip through this vomit-filled beginning stage and black-hole, I’d estimate, to the tail end of it all.
That’s the plan, anyway, because I’m not about to deny an opportunity to sedate sickness, especially when it’s presented itself in such a neat little package.
And also— no one’s home.
And also, I’ve seen my mom sneak two of these pills before when she bruised her foot falling down the stairs.. So monkey see, monkey do.
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After swigging the pill, I head over to the guest room and plop drugged-up vegetable style onto the bed. I sink into the silk pillowcase then click through some movies on the TV; chunks of regurgitated jelly and cough syrup still stick to my mouth as I scroll.
The storm’s wiped out our Wifi, so my only watchable options are The Grinch and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Old downloads leftover from family movie-night months ago on Christmas Eve.
I hit play on The Grinch, and as the minutes pass, I feel my face start flushing from the medication. Then I tumble into a state of feeling like my guts are sinking but my body is pirouetting, gently, like a fallen feather in no hurry to hit the ground.
Funnily enough, in this narcotic slumber, I dream about Mr. Grinch. The same one occupying the guest room TV as I’m blacked out.
This isn’t the first time he’s wandered into my dreams, though. As a kid suffering through puberty, intrusive and unspeakably peculiar dreams were a nightly horror-show, and Mr. Grinch was my unwanted but reliable sexual pen-pal. My first, and sadly, continued encounter with men who are hairy & alone & creepy crawly.
Even now at age 21— dreaming of the Grinch and I driving together down a highway made of peach fuzz— he remains just as unshakably sinister as he did when I was little: this long-fingered, chartreuse creature of chaos sitting next to me. Vacationing away from his dank cave where he normally skulks around and looms over a town full of children.
In this imaginary car ride, he somehow still carries with him his seclusion. His self-isolation and obsession— which is no longer focused on Christmas but on me, in the passenger seat next to him, staring at his yellow eyes. The type that pop from pitch black behind twisted trees or lurk in Wonderland at night. What is it about yellow eyes? They capture such an insane degree of spookiness with literally zero effort. My brain registers his lemon irises with the same level of dread I’d associate to a screech from the woods while camping or glimpsing the silhouette of a coat in my room after waking up at midnight.
His yellow eyes jolt.
They provide a mental alarm without waking me up.
I blame the Grinch for making my current sleep state insidious—
The Nightmare Before Christmas as well, which, coincidentally, also worms its way into my next dream; and whose primary villain, Mr. Oogie Boogie, is a star player. Yet another neon green freak but with skin strewn from burlap.
This new nightmare implants me into a scene from the film where he kidnaps Santa and toys with him in his sub-surface den. Where he sings about eating him. I witness him dance in the dark to sliding jazz strings and orchestrate his choir of bugs, which harmonize squeakily underneath his song. The entire thing is mania and festivity and horror intertwined.
Objectively, it sounds a little silly, but I’m truly terrified.
Even so, the idea of Christmas sidelined by Halloween will forever remain a genius concept to me. Yuletide imprisoned within the lens of orange and black. Trick-or-treating filtered through red and green. The wacko-ness of that combination. It intertwines spook and cheer flawlessly.
———————————————————————————————————————
With my head sweat-latched to the pillowcase, I wake up for a few seconds, hear some sleigh bells and indistinguishable murmurs from the TV, and then succumb once again to my sedation. The following dreams— courtesy of my fever, a pain killer, misery, and unwanted nostalgia— run as follows:
1.) Sex with an obese cop wearing dirty boxers. The boxers, for whatever reason, are printed with bacon and eggs. I guess because cops in my mind are pigs for breakfast; they collect their energy from sprinkled donuts and bagels congested with extra, extra sausage.
2.) A labyrinth of subterranean tunnels, occupied by a corpse-woman and a trapdoor spider. From an outside space I watch the woman and the arachnid running each other in circles like a twisted game of Pac-Man.
3.) Me and a couple of Greek gods canoeing across the Black Lake from Harry Potter.
4.) A repeating loop of that moment, years ago, when my uncle caught me measuring my erection in his room. He was dying of cancer at the time. Many cancers, actually. They had been paintballed around his body, but I couldn’t see. I was too young to register the doom of cells building upon cells.
But my dream forces me to relive that specific moment. One I’d purposefully left in the cold for years. To experience— reheated— that silence after my uncle caught me where I thought, “This is it. This is going to be the last thing he thinks about before he stops breathing.”
The last thing: me, a ruler, my 10-year-old penis, and a half-cup of my butterscotch pudding sitting on the nightstand.
I was horny and curious and bored and stupid. Plagued by gusts of testosterone until suddenly I was bare-bottomed in a hospice room, sighing as I attempted to reach the 5-inch mark… then crying in shame as my uncle closed the door. He was a man being eaten away by tumors and his final, dim scraps of life were, as I still imagine, my flexed dick and a crinkled tub of custard. We never talked about it… I said nothing.
I said nothing because Why turn it into something…?
But remaining afraid to speak with him about it, like all avoided conversations, did turn it into something. Unresolved.
Because is there anything less clear than the silence that pools into a room after someone’s closed the door?
Anything more heart-stopping than being caught off guard?
Anything more devastating than having all of my sureness invalidated by a single, flash- moment of feeling mortified?
All of the certainty I’d built in my life, in an instant, gone. Permanently clipped when he took his last breath and I just stood there, unsure…
I still can’t believe that.
The nightmare of that memory is embarrassing to the point of scary and petrifying enough to wake me up, officially.
I’ve had enough.
If memory is a cauldron filled with little frights, then a painkiller has spilled oil onto the flame.
I open my eyes quietly. The movie is almost over, but still, no one is home.
No one is home and I’m still miserable and dizzy… but I decide it’s best not to take another pill for it.
So I wander around the house and find my dog.
She’s laying next to the kitchen window.
I cuddle up with her and stare outside again, where it continues to rain, but this time the garden doesn’t look as scary.
It’s stupid, I realize, to be frightened of my own backyard.
Anonymous | July 5th, 2021 | Austin, Texas