I’m in one of those dreams where I know that I’m dreaming. Normally, those are great because they feature a hot guy who’s usually game to get down and dirty, but I can tell right away that this isn’t one of those kinds of dreams.
Turning around, I check out the backdrop that my subconscious created for me, and I’m immediately flooded by a sense of dread. Monochromatic walls in a tiny apartment that smells like stale coffee and cigarettes. I see the room, see the cardboard box of secondhand toys pushed haphazardly against the TV stand.
The sound of voices has me looking around, and I see a faceless couple, both blonde and tan, Charlie Brown voices blubbering back and forth.
Frowning, I watch their blurry forms move, talking to each other with impassioned hand gestures as they argue in the kitchen, and I know right then that this is them. My adoptive parents. The people who gave me up at three years old.
I back up, my heels hitting that cardboard box of toys behind me. But when I turn around to look, I see three-year-old me standing at my feet. My mouth goes dry as I stare down at me—because there’s no doubt that’s who this is.
Large gray eyes, too big for my small face, are haunted against pale skin and short, straight black hair. I stare at her, and she stares at me, and while everything else in this dream is muted and blurry, she’s vivid. Some might even think she looks creepy, but I know what’s behind those haunted eyes and tired dark circles.
Her mouth moves, and I kneel down in front of her, suddenly feeling like I want to cry. “What did you say?” I ask, forcing myself to hear her.
She looks at me steadily, no smile, no fidgeting one might expect from a little kid. “The monsters made me do it.”
Chills skate over my arms, and when she looks down, I look with her, only to see that she’s now holding a dead cat in her arms. Nausea roils up in my stomach, and I shoot up to my feet, willing this dream to go away, because I don’t want to remember what happens next. But my mind doesn’t seem to care.
Time flashes forward, and I’m not in the tiny apartment anymore, but outside a foreboding building, and this place I do recognize. Hyde Pediatric Psychiatry Ward.
The screams of my three-year-old self erupt around me, and I see me being carried into the ward, kicking and screaming, by Dr. Fallows. “He’s a monster! They’re all monsters!” I cry, but there’s no one there to advocate for me because my adoptive parents are already gone.
I know my file. I know the justifications. I was a danger to myself and others. I killed a pet. I threw myself down a flight of stairs. I wasn’t normal. I creeped people out. I constantly screamed and cried and spoke about the monsters.
But...now I know that none of it was in my head. Dr. Fallows was just another demon, and I was being taken away by the very monsters I was so terrified of.
The scene flashes away as a sob gets caught in my throat.
“Wake up,” I tell myself, but it doesn’t work. I’m in too deep. Just the thought of trying to dig myself out makes exhaustion wrap around me like ropes tossed over my body, yanking me further down.
When the scene bounces away to a new time and place, it’s smack dab in the middle of the fight. The last time I saw my one and only steady boyfriend of two years.
I see my twenty-four-year-old self standing with her hands braced on the metal countertop, a pane of thick plastic separating me from Matt while he screams at me on the other side, calling me all kinds of names, like psycho, crazy, bitch.
My jaw grinds as I listen to him yell about all the empty bottles of alcohol he found hidden beneath the sink of our apartment—the ones I hadn’t been able to get rid of because I was in jail. Then he harps on me about the weed and the sleeping pills, as he spills all my secrets to the people around us, all the things I’d hidden from him. I tried to self-medicate, desperately attempting to ignore the monsters that I constantly saw every damn day of my life. But I always slipped up sooner or later. And that time, I slipped