Dear Brother Smith:
Last night was one of those flashback nights. Dreams of being chased, all night. The slightest sound wakes me up, and then it's back into the maze, the endless corridors and doors and your relentless pursuit.
You didn't catch me last night. Maybe that's a sign that somehow your grip is loosening its hold on my gut. There wasn't the familiar waking, gasping, body so frozen that air can't quite make its way into my lungs. I actually woke up with a goal in sight, a savior figure of some sort. You wouldn't understand how silly and how profound that is to me: to have a dream where you're about to catch me again and instead of waking up at the moment your arms close around me, I wake in a large room, racing to the center because I see the Doctor at a desk in the center. Those are firsts - to have you not catch me, to dream of the Doctor, to see him as a composite of Tennant, Davidson, McCoy. No Baker, that's a surprise.
I haven't dreamed of a savior before. Oh, there was that X trip where I saw myself as my own healer, but that seems different. This is the first time someone else has been there to rescue me, and it makes me think that it would have been nice if I had had a savior as a child, someone who would have put a stop to what you were doing to me.
What was the trigger of this dream? It's weird, but it just came to me. I bought peanut butter for D. yesterday. He's been taking peanut butter sandwiches for lunch lately, as a change from ham. I can't stand the stuff, as you know. Funny how smells are so primal in my world - the smell of scotch, the smell of peanut butter. I love the delightful combination of peanut butter and chocolate, but I can't ever smell the peanut butter in that, and that makes it OK. One whiff of the stuff, though, and I'm right back in that bedroom with your buddy, peanut butter on his body to encourage me to lick, you sitting on the sidelines, watching. My stomach clenches again, I feel the acid coming up again, I force myself back to that neutral, quiet place at the center of my soul and turn off the world to stop from puking.
Gee, I haven't touched a jar of peanut butter in...decades? Can't remember the last time. So maybe that was the trigger, handling that stuff. Didn't catch it at the time. Huh.
D. doesn't know why I can't stand the smell of peanut butter. That's one of the things I haven't told him. He's had to hear a lot over the years, as I've put myself back together. He really doesn't need another twisted touchpoint in my life, of something trivial in the everyday that spins me back into the past, to that place in my body that still remembers, still feels, traps the events of yesteryear.
He's conscientious, knows that the smell bothers me and doesn't eat it near me, and for that I'm grateful.
I've never understood that part of you. It's just too alien to me, I guess. I can understand how little boys are somewhat like little girls, how you might take me or S. or T. when you can't conveniently get to a little girl. But what was this sharing me with other men? I don't remember you getting off sexually on it, at least you were fully clothed while you watched. Was it the money? Is that it? I guess that kinda fits into your greater persona. How much did you get for me? I remember seeing the money exchange hands, but I have no idea how much I was worth. I remember you gave me $5 afterward. That was pretty typical, as I recall, though thankfully most of those memories are pretty blurred by the alcohol.
I suppose I should thank you for that - getting drunk usually just puts me back into the maelstrom of pain and entrapment and nausea. I thought when I found vodka that I had a free ticket to oblivion. It didn't smell like whiskey, which meant I could actually drink it without freezing up; but the experience, that floating, "peaceful" place is just revisiting that disembodied place I would retreat to whenever you started filling up one of my body openings or another with your own body. That empty place of retreat is a comfort in a way, yeah, but the transition - walking through the doorway when coming back - is like a bad acid flashback, and I'm in your arms, trapped, bleeding or drowning or vomiting or - or eating peanut butter off some stranger's body.
It's a pretty vivid memory. The green bedspread, the yellow curtains, the Mariachi style music in the background, the guy's dark hair, the occasional deep kiss from him. The peanut butter is heavy on his breath and on his tongue, too, and that just makes the event so much more intense. There's a lot of things I've learned to moderate and hold at arm's length, I can pretend to be somewhere else through most of these escapades. It's like it's happening to someone else, I can pretend I'm just watching it. That way I'm not screaming and crying and begging for it to stop. You don't like that. I don't want to hear about killing any more. I don't want to see you kill another animal as an example of what can happen to me, or someone else.
But kissing somehow breaks through most of the cotton I can build around myself. It's so...intimate. Immediate. Pressing. I can almost let everything else fade into the background, the things I'm led to do, told to do, to this stranger's body. But the intensity of him kissing me on the mouth, the peanut butter invading my senses along with his tongue, is something I can't quite turn off.
Suffocating on this smell, on this taste, in some ways is worse than suffocating on your fluids. When literally drowning, I'm dying because I have no choice; when drowning on just a smell, it's like I'm willing myself to die.
Well, I'm just writing because I obviously am thinking of you again. Maybe someday this will all be done and I can go to sleep with true faith that I'll have a good night, a restful night, and wake up feeling refreshed. I mean, what else is there to learn about you and the past?
It is over, right?
Why am I asking you? You're dead, your body's been decomposing for a good number of years.
When will your legacy die?
-ve