Dear Jennybean,
Well. Your inaugural dream is a hard act to follow. It was full of cocaine-babies! Assassins!! Romance (sort of)!!! How will I up the ante?
With undiluted shame, of course. How fitting.
Let’s set the scene.
Any good twenty-something shame dream worth its salt starts with Mom, doesn’t it? Fortunately for Mom, her involvement in my sheer embarrassment basically starts and ends with her presence. She is neither cause nor effect. (That’s it, Mom, I swear. This does not warrant a concerned phone call.)
Our story begins with a wholesome family road trip. My mother, sister, and I have driven to Savannah, GA, for a dual-purpose.
- We are visiting a childhood friend of my mother’s, Kris; a woman who, incidentally, welcomed me into her home during my senior year of college while I was working an internship.
- We are attending a music festival, because… I mentioned this was a shame dream, right?
This all sounds pretty normal. Just a couple of lively broads about town, rocking and rolling. V. v. cool. V. v. fresh.
It gets weird.
We arrive at Kris’ house to find that… well, it’s not really a house. To be clear, it’s a souvenir shop hawking “I <3 Savannah” t-shirts, unlicensed band merch, keychains, and a host of other useless items to be shoved in drawers and promptly forgotten about. However, unlike, you know, 95%~ of other tourist-trap souvenir shops, this place is hoppin’. It’s uncomfortably busy. Merch is flying off the shelves.
Almost as soon as we’ve arrived at Kris’, we’re heading out the door for day one of the festival, which appears to be taking place in some sort of abandoned warehouse. The crowds have only gotten worse here. It’s hot. It’s sweaty. Someone spills beer on me.
So, kind of an average festival.
Grizzly Bear is playing a set. Though they’re one of my favorite bands and I’ve been dying to see them for years, I feel disappointed. I’m exhausted from the thirteen-hour drive, stressed out, and deeply uncomfortable. The music doesn’t sound right. I’m nervous about losing my mom and sister in the crush.
Day changes to night, night changes to day.
Everything looks a bit better in the morning (even in dreams). I wake refreshed. Kris’ souvenir shop home has emptied, all the merch having been sold. What remains is candy, bags of junk food, and a few cheap mugs likely made in sweatshops. I sit at the kitchen table (conveniently located in the middle of the souvenir shop) with my mom and sister beside me. Across from me sits one of my high school acting teachers and her daughter. How or why they’ve joined us, I have no clue. They serve seemingly no purpose but to make me feel somehow out of place in my own dream.
Kris joins us in the kitchen, sunshiney as always, ready for another day working the register. “I think some pipes burst,” she cheerfully informs us. “The whole house is flooding.”
Oh, okay. That’s cool.
The water rises quickly, all muddy and brackish. This is a river in the midst of the flood: bacteria-ridden waters that dirty me as I wade, with some effort, from room to room. A bit gets in my mouth and I almost immediately feel sick.
This is where the problems really start. See, I have to pee, and in a bad way. An urgent way. I make it to the end of the hall, swimming to the bathroom, only to find the house’s other inhabitants all sitting in a corner bedroom, playing video games on a small television. They’re laughing, enjoying themselves.
What strikes me is the plush, white carpet in the bedroom where the others are laughing. It’s completely unsullied. How has the water not spilled through the open doorway? It’s as if an invisible barrier is in place to keep everything bad out.
“Kris, I really have to use the bathroom.”
“Toilet’s not working,” she replies with glee. “You’ll have to go in the basement.”
Oh.
The Basement: a completely normal place to urinate.
Okay, remember that shame component I heavily alluded to in the beginning?
Something happens as I walk down the stairs. The basement is not Kris’, but the basement of my father’s home, the house that I grew up in. The light is yellow and overly shiny. I get the distinct feeling that I’m shrinking, that I’m no longer even fully clothed.
Worst of all, I just can’t hold it in any longer. I squat right there on the stairs, my shorts around my ankles, and start pissing.
Underneath the stairs, I can see piles of old sneakers, too-small winter clothing, and sun-faded beach gear. And I’m pissing on it all.
Of course, because this is a shame dream, this is also a full-on Tom-Hanks-in-A-League-of-Their-Own piss. It just. Won’t. Stop.
It is, as you might have guessed, the perfect time for Eternally-Joyful-Dream-Kris to appear at the top of the stairs with a very important question:
“Have you seen my sneakers?”
Preternaturally polite, Kris is kind enough not to comment on the half-naked girl squatting at her feet. Instead, she stops, peeks under the stairs, and exclaims, “Oh, there they are!” She plucks her white, urine-soaked sneakers from the basement refuse and promptly steps into them.
It is only after she’s left that my traitorous bladder squeezes itself dry.
At this point, I really, really, really don’t want to walk upstairs, but I do. The others are still in the bedroom playing games. The water begins to drain from the home, as if the stopper has been pulled on a massive bathtub.
I look down at my feet and begin wiggling my bare toes. They’re covered in dirt. And I imagine, more than a little urine.
Jenny, there’s a lot going on here.
I didn’t wake from this feeling bad, necessarily, but I was rushing to the bathroom as soon as my alarm went off. Oh, and I had this great Grizzly Bear song stuck in my head…
Please let me know if it’s my brain that’s upset or just my bladder.
Yours dreamily,
Mackenzie