looked frantic and delusional. Things got even more delusional when he started throwing obstacles into my way. Banana peels, metal spikes like the kind they put at toll booths to keep your car from driving the wrong way; even live cats that yowled when he tossed them into the path of the aisle and then landed on their feet and scurried away. What in the hell was going on? This was crazy.
I called out to Scott to ask him what he was doing and why he was trying to keep me from walking. I asked him to stop. But he just kept throwing armfuls of crazy shit in my path, trying to block me from getting down the aisle to where the man was supposed to be. I stopped walking and instead ran off the side of the aisle and toward my brother.
“Stop it!” I shouted at him. “Why are you doing this? Don’t you want me to be happy?”
I didn’t even know if walking down this aisle was making me happy. I couldn’t even see a man at the end of it. I threw the flowers in my hand down at his feet, and he immediately lifted his boot to trample them.
“Why are you acting like this?” I asked him. “Don’t you care about me?”
Scott looked up at me with feverish eyes and tears streaming down his cheeks. “I can’t lose you, Clara!” he yelled. “I can’t lose you like I lost them.”
Something prompted me to glance back down the aisle again, and this time I saw two coffins in the place where the altar should have been. I felt as if my body were sliding closer toward them, even though my feet weren’t walking or moving at all. I looked back over my shoulder and saw my brother still standing there, this time with his head in his hands. All the obstacles in front of me were gone, and it was as if I were being pulled toward the coffins, which I could see from here were open.
No, no, no.
I muttered to myself and tried to wake myself up from the dream. I didn’t want to reach the end of the aisle. I didn’t want to see what I knew was already inside those caskets. I closed my eyes and tried to dig my heels into the ground. When I finally came to a stop, I could feel that I was standing in front of those boxes without even needing to open my eyes to see. It was like one of those bad horror movies where you have your eyes closed, but you can still hear the sounds and the images play out in your head just as horribly as if you were watching it. I pressed my eyes closed harder, fighting against my opening eyelids.
“Clara,” DeShawn’s voice said in my dream.
I was immediately startled awake. Thank God. I sat up quickly and pushed the blankets off as I threw my feet to the floor to get out of bed. I didn’t want to sleep anymore because I didn’t want to dream. That one single dream made up for years of being nightmare free. It brought all of my fears together into one nightmarish mixed cocktail. I stumbled into the bathroom and splashed water onto my face. Then I looked up in the mirror at myself. I admittedly looked awful.
That dream really shook me, and it did one hell of a job of taking the things that my conscious mind was stressed about and warping them. I was worried about Scott and felt like I needed to always be here for him, always trying to take care of him and the farm. I was still grieving my dead parents and hadn’t really even taken the time to process the horrible way in which they had died. And I was terrified at what would happen if I allowed myself to get close to DeShawn, only to end up not being able to have him. Any one of those things would have been bad enough, but all of them together truly sucked.
I wondered why now, after all this time, I would be having such crazy dreams. It wasn’t like me. Maybe it had something to do with being sick. I had fallen straight asleep after puking my guts out this afternoon, and maybe that was why my dream was so messed up. I didn’t feel sick now, just tired, which was also weird considering that I had gotten even more