Maybe I’m In Love…Maybe That’s Enough

I don’t know why I wrote it, except that I enjoy being consumed by the throes of procrastination.
So, here is my story.

Judy and the Dream of Monsters

The waifish child was upright in her bed and shivering, but it wasn’t cold.
She lay terrified in the darkness and no one believed her, but she wasn’t lying.

There was a monster in her closet.

She couldn’t sleep, she knew it only made her vulnerable. She told her parents and they feigned interest, she knew she couldn’t depend on them.

Darling, they would plead, just go to sleep.
You look so unkempt, they would whine, there’s no monster in your closet.

But there was.

Sometimes she felt brave enough to face their disapproval and she tried to crawl under their comforting covers, but she never got to nestle her sleep deprived limbs inside the warm folds of blankets.

She was eight. She shouldn’t have been carrying on with this nonsense anymore. At least, that’s what the manuals all said.

She begged, and lingered by the door with her possum eyes.
They always turned away, and waited for her to give up.

Why would their books lie? They were sure that they were doing the right thing.
She walked back down the unlit hallway, ducking between the shadows.

She pulled her sheets around her face. She sat in her sleepless fear and watched for the voyeuristic glare from behind the closed doors.
She didn’t know where, or why, or how, or what kept coming for her.

She only knew that it was waiting.

Insomnia began to wreak havoc on her impish body. She watched her parents watch her descent as they trawled through their volumes, their chapters, their pages for the solution.

She never could quite work out why they based their entire existence on the impersonally printed words. She could never quite understand why their living room would change periodically, although it invariably did so to match up with the latest style advice.
She could never discover their fascination with being so perfect.
Although, if she was being honest it was really much more than that.

They never stood out from the crowd as if they prided themselves on remaining generic.
They couldn’t stand to deviate from the accepted lifestyle of their white middle class suburbia. They couldn’t stand to have a daughter so willfully dismissive of the proper progression of adolescence that she continued to pretend to see something that could not possibly be there.

They had tried.

She’d never read the wrong things, worn the wrong things, seen the wrong things, heard the wrong things, had relationships with the wrong things. She’d never done anything wrong and now this?

They tried to comfort themselves with the knowledge that it was probably just a phase, maybe even a normal one. She’ll just grow out of it.

These warm thoughts, however, began to mean less and less as the years kept on changing.
The monster was still there.

The one time little girl was now seventeen, but she was still scared, still sleepless, still so alone.
Sometimes she questioned her sanity, but then night fell again and even with her eyes closed she felt the overbearing and watchful gaze that she knew was upon her.

She tried so hard to fit the mold.
She knew that her parents hated that she was different.
She knew that her parents hated what was different.

They hated the spinster on the corner in her ponchos and clogs because she was different.
They hated the homosexuals behind them with their rainbow children because their were different.
They hated the unwed teenaged parents living in their father’s house because they were different.
She knew too, even if they would never announce it, that they hated her.

They had to, she saw it in their faces.

The darkness that framed her eyes sank into her skin until she could barely raise her head.
She sat and wondered through the repetitive questions that she had been haunted with almost as long as she had been haunted by the monster.

She wondered why she was the one that had to have a monster, why she was the one whose parents hated her, she just wondered why.

She’d never sought to bring this upon her family, but the fact that she didn’t do this knowingly was of little compensation.

She was screaming internally.
There was a monster in her closet! Why would she possibly have a reason to lie about this?
Why couldn’t they at least try to accept it?
They wouldn’t know.
They’d never even looked.

Her parents couldn’t understand. They were becoming impatient.
She was mere months away from being an adult, and their situation was becoming ridiculous.
Why couldn’t she be just like the other girls? The other normal girls?
The normal, smiling, laughing adolescents staring at them from the pages of their manuals like a slap in the face.

They lived their entire lives without deviation, without being noticed, without doing anything wrong or right enough for someone to look upon them with judgment. Their only dreams were for their two point three children to be born with ten fingers, ten toes, and the same simple desires for conformity.

The hopes were dashed when they were only able to conceive one precious girl. A tiny bundle that was now stomping all over the few, tattered dreams that they had left.
She was crazy, inconsiderate, ridiculous, abnormal.
She was ruining their lives.

They watched her sit on the front steps, unabashedly staring into her bedroom window. She refused to go inside until they would push her through the door, but they couldn’t imagine why.
It was such a perfect, perfectly normal room, they’d followed directions carefully.

One more still night of silence broke the reverie of their minds.
They decided to take action. They struck at midnight.

The two adults ran into the dimly lit room screaming and shouting.

She was already clutched by insomnia, curled on her bed in shivers, barely seeing.
Her eyes were fixed on the closed door.

Soon echoing screaming reverberated around the primly decorated walls.

WHERE’S THE MONSTER? WHY ISN’T IT HERE? WHY CAN’T I SEE IT? IS IT SHY? IS IT? IS IT?

Father pulled open the door.
He was about to prove that there was no monster there now, or before, or ever, his triumphant grin already sprawled across his face when he saw Mother’s twisted in horror.

He turned around and was gone.

A smile, her first, formed across her delicate features.

“See Daddy,” she whispered. “I told you there was a monster…”

*shrugs*
X