Let There Be Light

I am deep in sleep, and the nightmares ebb and swirl in my head as they always have. I am running amidst hellish landscapes, with sinister smoke for sky and an atmosphere of billowy haze, and it is my job to save her, to guide her safely… where? She is my mother, even though I don’t see her face and she’s always one step behind me to my left. We cross quicksand and fire and grimy bogs, steep terrain and never-ending pathways that somehow sprawl differently with every step, and we stop to talk with people who ask for directions in monotone, eyes blank. A girl I barely know when I’m awake, Katie, wants to know how much further. Just keep going, I tell her. It takes awhile, but you’ll get there. Get where? The road gets wider, the mass of journeyers, thicker. But they’re all going to, as we go fro. Mountains shrouded in ash loom in the distance; the sky is red. We walk.

In the conscious world, it is the full moon. That is to say, the Sagittarius sky has transitioned to Gemini, so this fucked-up month of people leaving and fighting and running wild will (says my friend Paul) disappear with a blood red moon and a night of bad feelings (Paul again) proved true or false. I awake afraid. It never gets easier: the sensations felt from childhood night terrors – chest seizing, heart sprinting, feeling torn between both closing my eyes again (what if the nightmare resumes?) and getting up for a glass of water (but what if the darkness gets me?) – are no less impeding even though my feet have long since reached the end of the bed. The air conditioner rattles, but there’s something else making noise in my kitchen, on the stairs, in the hallway. A face appears in my doorway – (my roommate) Sarah? – shortish, short-haired, silhouetted, a tinge of blonde in the shards of moonlight escaping through closed blinds. She looks around my room, not at me, and turns to go. I check my phone – why is it that the most important thing when we’re disoriented and afraid is to know the time? – 4:17 a.m. But Sarah is supposed to be at her cabin this weekend. Something has happened. I call out to her.

Nothing. More banging around in the kitchen. Sarah’s bedroom light doesn’t turn on, bed remains disheveled and empty. I lock my door, hide my valuables (in bed with me), pull the covers up to my chin (worked when I was six), and wait. More acerbic nightmares, the kind I’ll protect Sarah from ever knowing, the kind that makes me call her the second I wake up to see if she’s okay. She is. Doors and windows still locked, kitchen in order, everything in its right place. And so I am haunted. Awesome.

A presence isn’t that surprising, really. I was that child who took walks with things I called angels, who saw them glide into my parents’ room when we got back from long trips and then disappear when I ran after them, who learned things from Ouiji boards that didn’t just become self-fulfilling prophesies (did they?), who floated straight to the ceiling during “light as a feather, stiff as a board,” fell back into my body and the outstretched fingers of a circle of third-graders who didn’t seem to notice where I’d been. Everything was simple light or dark back then – good or evil, angel or demon, from heaven or from hell. Or maybe it still is, and I’ve just gone like sheep, astray.

If it scares you, then it’s evil said my father, the morning after “she” visited. I must go back to Him, start reading scripture again, fortifying myself with the armor of which I used to sing and pantomime in Sunday school so many years ago. Don the helmet of salvation and the shield of faith with grandiose gesture, stick out my righteousness-plated breast and stomp those peace and gospel-clad feet, the (s)word of the spirit unsheathed before me. I say okay, Daddy, I’ll think about it, even though I know I won’t – at least not for a while. I do miss when it was simple to just get out of bed on Sundays and go to church, when I could use words like “faith” or “savior” without flustering, could believe that I truly am – what do they say? – fearfully and wonderfully made. And now when I pray, usually when I lose something or am smack in the middle of a panic attack, I tend to stop half way through the first plea for help, exasperated at the sudden realization that I might be talking to nothing. And then nothing comes along and talks to me, and I’m a mess.

I always call my father when things get like this; when I get like this. I’m afraid that part of me is just humoring him, like when she comes back in the middle of the day a few weeks later, when Sarah is out and when I’d just finished telling someone my story, and I feel something in the air, like breath or heaviness or both, and I call my dad because I promised him I would if she ever came back, and he tells me to cast her out, yes like an exorcism. I shouldn’t have tried to speak to her when I felt the heaviness; I told her it was a low blow to give my oversensitive imagination nightmares, to appear to me in the witching hour of a full moon, for goodness sake, but that if she didn’t like our crazy parties we’d stop throwing them, but that I wasn’t going anywhere and so I hope we could make peace. She responded by turning the kitchen sink on, off, on again, and off, banging glasses and plates and rummaging in the cupboards. After the indignation (She’s the bitch disrupting my house, my afternoon. Why doesn’t she love me?), I shook, and my body temperature went snowy. She’d made her point, I guess, and at my father’s suggestion I made mine: tiny olive oil crosses above every doorframe, In the name of Jesus Christ you will not enter here! (and at Sarah’s: you will not hurt my Sarah). The embarrassment of talking to nothing had nothing on that, and ugh does my voice always sound so… meek? From her alternate realm window, I’m sure she was laughing (though she’s yet to return again).

When it’s the witching hour and things like this happen, the disparity between silence and noise feels vast as chasms, stuns to stillness. But in the middle of the day, cars drive by and people walk or bike by, and the shop on the corner does its dealings, and nothing outside my haunted house suggests the darkness that lingers in the in-between. My father kept cutting out as we spoke; I was certain she’d made her way into the airwaves, like monsters breaking free from the closet. Maybe she’s here because we needed to have this conversation, because you’re being prodded back to the light, my father says, familiar voice full of that steadfast certainty I’ve always admired, even though it fails to move me now. I wish this sickness were just for fear – she could be lighting my kitchen on fire, breaking all of Sarah’s dishes, coming to possess me, to steal my sanity. My childhood faith could have vanished for good – or have I banished it? But I do not linger upon these things. For what plagued me most was shame: yes, I was humoring my father.

But I haven’t lost sight of everything. If I absolutely had to choose, I’d probably say creationism. Maybe only because it’s more romantic, the idea of a heavenly easel, of an omnipotent imagination whose very breath gives life, but still. I still get queasy when I watch True Blood, when characters orgy and drink each others’ blood and literally rip the hearts each others’ chests and at the end of every subsequent terror of a day, the only one Sookie wants to hold her as she sleeps must leave her at dawn, lest he burst into flames, char into nothingness. Is it because I’m just sensitive, or is that the kind of perversion all those youth pastors were talking about? Maybe it just hurts less to trust scientific proof. And am I just supposed to accept that I flawed and fallible, then, if I can’t manage to tear myself away from the television screen (save for closing my eyes when the blood pours thick)?

And when someone’s misguided son or daughter shot up the corner by the Gay 90s a few weeks ago and I – along with my misfitting Minneapolis (friend) family, had left but two minutes before, heard the gunshots as we entered the parking lot, tried to convince myself it was firecrackers even though I knew is wasn’t, tried to be brave for Sarah, because how often does she get to come out into the gritty, sweaty, pulsating city with us? – breathed silent prayers of gratitude to the one who may or may not guide our cars swiftly home and waited to cry until I’d brushed my teeth, shed my dress, and tucked myself in tight. Because if any of us had been lost, where would we go?

There’s a reason I won’t watch scary movies or shows: they fester. All it would take is one too many bumps in the night onscreen before I’d forget to check if it’s really just the air conditioner, nothing more, that’s doing the rattling. As it is, every time the internet goes down or the breeze coming through the window feels slightly colder than it ought to, I listen for her. I remember the night after her first visit, I had plans to go out dancing, even though no part of me wanted to go anymore. The dark outside scares me too, I guess. It was getting close to midnight, and my friend Jenny needed to go to the bathroom before we left. It was dark upstairs, and I followed her, flipping the stairway lights on for her. The poster hanging on the wall halfway up had been torn down in one corner – a coincidence that had me sleeping in other people’s beds for days. Some things you just can’t shake with an extra loop of Scotch tape. Although it must have been Sarah who hung it back up.