I was in a large room that looked like a video game: there were different levels of raised flooring and rivers running from one side of the room to the other. I saw on my far left a bank of ten light switches. I had to figure out the correct switch combination to open the door I needed at the opposite corner of the room.

I hopped down one level and crossed over a small stream. When I reached the light switches, bad guys, creatures, and aliens came from different doors to stop me.

I fought them off for a bit until I happened on the correct configuration. A flying metal disk with robot-like tentacles hovered over me; I cut off a few of the tentacles and they screamed. I crawled on top of the disk so they could not get me. I was going to ride the disk to the now opened door.

I was lying in the front pew of a church B and I were visiting. When the sermon was over, a man who had been sitting further down on my right came over to us and shook B’s hand, then mine. I said my name to him, emphasizing my last name so that he knew B and I were married.

He walked off and no one else even talked to us. B said that man was Jason’s dad. I told B that he could have introduced the two of us properly.

Our coats were on the pew behind us. There were a lot of coats; I looked and looked but could not find my black down vest.

Pam, Melissa, Loren Absher, and I were at a night club partying. When we got back to the church parsonage it was very late and very dark. We were putting our regular clothes back on when the youth pastor’s wife Cindy came over from the church and demanded to know where we had been and what we had done.

I got into her face and asked why she needed to know all that stuff about us. She told me that the church needed to track all of our spending and asked what we had bought and where we had gone. Speaking for the group, I refused to give her any information, saying that we had as much of a right to privacy as anyone.

I stood at the top of some bleachers in a school gymnasium. There were three pep bands sitting in the stands doing some sort of a band play-off. I was enjoying the music when I realized the band directly below me wasn’t playing at all. The band was very small. The keyboardist wasn’t even sitting by his keyboard, the percussionist was barely tapping the bass drum.

I leaned over the ledge and tried to coax the drummer to pound on the drum loud enough that I could hear him. I asked the keyboardist why he wasn’t playing. I told him that the band needed him and they could not do it without him because he was the melody.

The other members of the band were pretty nerdy looking and weren’t interested in playing music. I wanted them to win.

I stood with a man in a long dark coat. I traded a nubby ball-type object for something that he had and I wanted. As soon as the nubby ball left my fingers, I knew that I shouldn’t have given up the ball. I really wanted what he had.

I slept on a bed in my parents’ living room. When I woke, the bottom sheet was soaking wet because I had bathed before going to bed, and my hair was still wet.

I was walking on a path through the woods with five or six others. We came to a clearing in the middle of nowhere. It looked to be a reasonably well-kept piece of property that was surrounded by a low fence. The path passed directly below the clearing. We stopped at the gate and peered in: the ground sloped up from the gate.

Melissa walked through the gate and I followed. Standing in the center of the small field, I saw an old bald man at the very top of a spruce tree watching us. I looked at Melissa but could tell she hadn’t seen him; I looked back and he was gone.

The man’s appearance and disappearance worried me. I physically pulled Melissa back through the gate and onto the path. I knew that if we had stayed in the field any longer that man would have kept us prisoner.

I convinced the group to move on before someone else went through the gate. That piece of land was haunted.

I stood in a short line to register for college. There were four or five other lines on my left, all of them filled with my high school classmates. The lines were moving extremely slow and everyone was restless.

I noticed a shorter line far to my right that was moving much faster. I pulled B by his arm over to the short line. There were two special needs kids in front of us, and then we were at the front.

The woman behind the counter asked if we wanted the special meal plan. I asked her what it was, but she didn’t answer me. I asked her a few more times, and she finally told me that you would move from home to home, building to building, and different people feed us a different meal.

I was sightly confused and stammered that I was a good cook and B liked my cooking. Feeling a bit more composed, I told her that I liked cooking so we wouldn’t be needing any meal plan.

We were then outside in the middle of campus following a few boys who were walking around the campus in trench coats with their hands stuffed deep in their pockets.

I was at my parents’ home with Damon and Melissa. It was April first, Damon’s birthday. He had a friend over and the two of them were playing with some computer periferal that hung on the wall.

I asked cryptically, “What are we going to do today?” knowing that Damon would know I was referring to his birthday. He didn’t reply and acted as though he didn’t want his gay friend to know it was his birthday.

I was in gym class at school. There was a large metal grid laid out over the ground like an enlarged drain gate. Melissa and the other students jumped feet first into one of the grid holes that led under the ground. I stared down the hole where she jumped for a long time before trying it myself, but my hips were too big and I didn’t fit in the hole.

I went into the coach’s office to explain the problem to him. He sat behind his desk and said that if I didn’t complete the assignment, I would fail the class. I knelt on the floor, sitting on my feet, and stared out his window.

I put my face in my hands and cried with every ounce of energy I had because Melissa was dead and never coming back. The coach stood behind me for a bit, but then walked out of the office because he didn’t know how to handle my crying.

I was then in math class. The math teacher made the students come out onto the floor and form a circle. She walked around and the other students followed her.

I stood waiting for some verbal instructions, and she yelled at me for not moving with her. I told her I was waiting for instructions, and she told me that I would fail the class. I left the room and wondered if my schedule could take dropping both math and gym.

My boyfriend was in the hallway, and as I hugged him I broke his necklace. I pretended it was an accident even though I did it on purpose. Because of the math teacher, I was no longer allowed to see him.

I got really brave one afternoon and rang his doorbell. My mom answered the door wearing a bright red vest. ‘Come in, come in,’ she said. She was very happy to see me.

We walked into an extremely large kitchen, and I wondered why I hadn’t noticed the last time I was in her home. In the very tall wall over the stove was a large glass tank filled with hundreds of gallons of water. Instead of fish, there were chickens swimming in the tank. She told me that chicken is always better when they are live and fresh.

B stood in the hallway and was very happy to get to see me. We embraced.

My hair stretched from one side of the room to the other. A man commented on how long and pretty it was. I thought about cutting it.

I ran up to a large metal gate right as the doors closed. It was cold and dark out, and I was wearing a parka. I rang the doorbell and two men came out of the gate with machine guns pointed at me.

I got down on my knees and put my gloved hands in the air. I knew I was going to be okay and wanted to remove one of my gloves to show this.

The two men led me through the gate and to a large mansion like building. Inside it resembled a hotel and a dormitory. There were a lot of young men, approximately college aged, standing and talking around the foyer.

I was very tired and really wanted to sleep. One man was put in charge of me, and I had to wait in the foyer for him. I couldn’t understand what the men around me were saying. I was led up a staircase; the upper floor resembled a dormitory hallway and a hospital hallway.

I walked around the square hall. Mostly there were doors, like in a dormitory, but one side of the building had a long row of beds and no separate rooms. I saw on one bed a girl slept naked and the covers fell off of her as she slept. I felt embarrassed for her in a house full of men.

The only place available was in a double bed on the end of the long row; I shared it with a sick man. I crawled under the covers, trying not to touch the man on the other side of the bed, and wanted to find the boy in charge of me.

He found me and led me to his small but private room. He closed the door behind me and pressed me against it. He pressed his body against mine, and all I could think about was how hard his body was. He kissed me and his bed was on the opposite end of the small room.

I was sitting at dinner with the Garvey family; they son, Josh, was my boyfriend. I was very worried about not pleasing his mother.

B put Lacey in her kennel because B and I were leaving. As we were just about to leave the apartment, Lacey ran out of the bedroom. I said to B, “I thought you put her in her Kennel,” and he insisted he did.

I put her back in, then turned around and she was outside of the kennel. Once more I put her into the kennel, I watched her pull on the metal lever with her teeth, which opened the kennel door. She had been getting out all by herself.

I had no idea what we were going to do with her for the evening while we were out. She couldn’t be left loose and now she could easily escape her kennel.

I was driving my little Dodge Neon and got stuck on an iced-over river. The banks of the river were too tall and too slick to drive up. I got out of the car, walked up the banks and into a house facing the river. It was just getting dark outside.

Inside the house, B was hanging sheetrock in the upstairs bathroom. A piece of wood was attached to the wall vertically splitting the wall in two, much like a door jam. He slipped a piece of sheetrock behind the wood strip for the right side of the wall. I left for a bit; when I came back B had hung lamps, framed pictures, and other doo-dads on the left side of the wall.

I was very worried and told him it was all wrong: he was supposed to hang the sheetrock first. We cannot put the pictures up before the sheetrock.

I felt like everything was spinning out of control. I left in a huff and crying. I stumbled down the steep river bank to my car. I stood staring at the car, determined to drive it out of there.

Melissa and I had driven hundreds of miles to a friend’s mansion and we planned to walk back. With an extremely long hike ahead of us, I tried to consolidate my two backpacks into one so I could carry my stuff easily. I packed on water bottle and went to drain the second when I realized I was so incredibly thirsty that my throat hurt in a burning, scratching sort of way.

I refilled my bottle in the bathroom where the sink is covered and opened like a grand piano: a piece over the top opened left to right, and a piece over the front that pulled up.

My companion, now a male instead of Melissa, checked on my progress. I stood up and was at least half his height. I reached my arms up like a child and he stooped to pick me up. I bent back down and placed my water bottle on the ground, then jumped into her arms.

I wrapped my legs around my torso. I felt so close to him; he was my lover.

design/content © 2001-2003
movabletype