Rhymes with Lunt
an excerpt

There were very dark days, of course. The dark days were frightening in their depth. They were a place from which she could almost not emerge.

During the dark days, dreams blended with reality. She was never certain--and she still isn't really sure now--what was real and what was a dream. The dreams felt real and reality felt fake--she remembered elements of her nighttime dreams during the day and remembered places she'd been during the night with great clarity in the daylight. She was living two lives--one mundane and workaday, one fantastic and rife with symbols and emotional sturm und drang.

One dream place was underwater. She felt certain about that. It was warm, but the water got cooler the lower you went. There was a reflection of golden light at the surface, but Allison almost never felt like she was there. She was at the murky bottom. She was being pulled downward, headfirst. Her body, weightless from the immersion, jerked and yanked towards the muddy floor.

When she got there, her fists and feet became involuntarily coated in bottom-mud. She was weighted down there by the very floor itself. From her perspective, there was ten feet of water above and she was stuck to the bottom. Looking up, she could see the shimmer of the golden light above, but there was something comforting about where she was. It felt safe and cool and dim. She didn't want to emerge. While beautiful and golden, like a piece gold foil on a chocolate truffle, it was hyperreal and she was not comfortable with the hyperreal.

She stood on the bottom and surveyed the scene from her eyes and from a camera view about ten feet away. She was simultaneously the actor and the cameraperson in this dream. From ten feet away, she saw a sad girl in a victorian-style nightgown. She'd had one of these nightgowns in the 1980's. Her mom gave it to her for "christmas pajamas" (they got a new pair each year) and she had had it on the first time she'd kissed a girl.

The girl in the nightgown had long hair. She hadn't had long hair for a very long time, but herself as the underwater girl had long brown hair. And the hair was aloft and active in the water. The current was pulling the hair atmospherically, like snakes winding around and around her head.

The light underwater was dim and everything was soft-focus. Underwater, she looked pale but beautiful. It was like she had been done up by a makeup artist and she was shooting the notion of herself as sad girl who was trapped underwater.

This inside and outside problem, the issue of being both subject and object at the same time was something that she thought about a lot. She wrote about it with great frequency and urgency. She was worried that the vividness of the dreams and the loss of ability to remember what was real and what was not pointed to a small amount of mental instability.

She laughed about it a lot with her friends, but the thought that she had come unglued in the process of leaving Alex was something that nagged at her. She worried about her ability to be completely well again. She wondered if she would ever feel just baseline normal again. She suspected that it was starting to happen, but there were days when she was sure that she wasn't going to get back to herself or that herself would be so fundamentally changed from the events of November and December 2004 that she wouldn't be the same person again. Maybe that was a good thing, but from the bottom of the murky depths, she didn't think so.