I'm crazy. I am. I am not normal.
I get emails all the time asking me, "Bunny, why are you crazy. Why are you so damn crazy?"
Imagine you're six. You're sleeping lightly--only halfsies in sleep--on a hot summer night, your synthetic, pink nightie just a bit twisted around your midsection, suggesting you've not been sleeping long. You never sleep well. The color of your eyes in family photos of your childhood are unnoticeable, so shrouded in purple the skin beneath them is. You look like the grim reaper.
A breeze blows through the open window of your bedroom. It catches the gauzy fabric of your curtains and billows them a bit, shakes your Snoopy lampshade. The movement is unsettling. Any movement in the night is unsettling. It always has been, since...well...since time started for you, and you don't know why, but you are always afraid at night. What's more, no one believes you have a reason to be. You hear things you are told you didn't hear. You see things you are told you did not see, and the air of the world is full, solid, weighted with uneasy matter that no one else can see.
And then someone is pulling on your toes and tickling the bottoms of your feet. You snap to from whatever halfsies sleep you were experiencing and lift your head, but there's no one at the bottom of the bed. Just a few weird shapes and swirls. Something looks like an eye, and it winks at you. There's whispering and laughs. Sweat pours out through every pore on your body especially the wrinkled skin between your heels and your toes.
You spend the remainder of the night tossing and turning between your parents' annoyed torsos. "We've got to do something about this," says daddy. He sighs his displeasure with you. He is mad. It hurts when dad is mad at you, but you can't seem to stop seeing, hearing feeling things that are not there.
A thought dawns on you. Could you be? Are you? Are you are crazy?
Now, imagine you are seven. You are slumbering with your family along the St. Lawrence river in an old canvas camper your father has renovated. It is hot and summer again. No covers. Your sister sleeps next to you, deeply, snorting air through the tiny passage in her deviated nose. The campground is mostly quiet. There are the sounds of the barges blowing their great horns, some crackling/burning wood, and that crunch noise flip-flops on gravel make when campers head past to the community bathroom for a late night pee. Black shapes pass from one side of the canvas to the other: their shadows cast.
The family sleeps, but you do not. You never sleep well.
There is a desperate whispering on the other side of the canvas. A man. There's no shadow, but his voice is quite clear in your ear, and he mutters things like, "How could she do this to me...how...I don't...how could this happen...why...how did this happen." You can almost feel his sadness through the canvas, the air, different dimensions and total suspension of disbelief. It is impossible, but now you feel so desperately sad, and you were not sad before.
"Daddy, there's a ghost!" you cry out. He rolls over to his side and rubs his eyes.
"What do you mean?"
"A ghost! There's a ghost out there!"
Daddy is quite used to his daughter claiming there are ghosts everywhere, and mustering patience to deal with her and her ghosts--yet again--and at such a late hour is a tough feat. He is silent for a moment, during which time, one of the great horns of the barges on the St. Lawrence blows again. It's a haunting enough sound to explain the whole "ghost thing."
"Oh, honey, that's just a barge."
"No! No, it's a man. It's a ghost. He's right there; can't you hear him?"
"Honey...it's just a horn from a barge. It's okay. You're going to be fine."
And I was not fine. I had not been fine for some time, or to be honest, not any time I could remember. I was walking fear. Swirling shapes and noises followed me everywhere, even into my dreams, and I was often so terrified of being alone that there were nights I purposely wet the bed so that I'd have a reason to crawl into bed with mom and dad. I pissed myself so I wouldn't have be alone. I was not fine at all, and almost certain I was crazy.
"Just go to sleep. You'll be fine. You're fine," said my father, rolling onto his back, ignoring me again. The man continued his whispering on the other side of the canvas, and I couldn't lie back and pretend he wasn't there. I was not fine.
"I most certainly am not!"
Now.
Imagine you're 27. You sit next to your boyfriend and watch Deadwood on HBO, and somehow within the chunk of space that separates you from Ian McShane's face, a woman materializes. She has short blond hair and a neat appearance. She wears a pink and taupe sweater, the details of which you can clearly see. There's no fuzziness anymore. The bits of eyes and hands and noses that used to float around a few feet or so from your ceiling in your childhood bedroom are now very organized, very human-like busts and torsos, and they all seem to want something. They tell you what they want, because they can talk now, too. Great. Pushy, talky ghost torsos.
For some time now, you've been praying to various deities before bedtime--any of them that will listen--so you can get some sleep. You close your eyes and vigorously pray, "Dear Jesus, I know I haven't been your biggest fan, but that's more to do with the shitty people who follow your teachings than you, and anyway, can you please, please, please make a magical white bubble around me while I sleep, an impervious one, because I can't have dead people knocking on my skull all night. Xoxo, Erin." You're not one to praise Jesus, but this seems to keep the torsos away. You seem to be sleeping better. You can ignore whatever crazy is coming to you.
But the blond lady, she will not be ignored. She's rather pushy, actually. You tell her to go away. She says she won't, and that you have to tell your boyfriend something. A message.
No, you insist, and tilt your head to the right a bit so you can see Ian McShane snarl. Your boyfriend doesn't know you're crazy. He is a very rational person with a law degree, a materialist who thinks if you "can't see it, it doesn't exist."
She won't leave you alone. "Hello! I'm not going away!" she says. "He's in danger!" she says. "He's going to die!" she says.
And so you turn to your boyfriend and say, "Um...sweetie...did you used to know a blond woman...who died?"
"I don't know," he replies, his face all contorted. Quizzical.
"She says...er...she had blond hair and her name was Jane. She used to watch you when you were little."
"Jane? My godmother?" [The torso nods yes].
"Yes."
"What about her?"
"Well...and this is going to sound crazy, but...she's here, and she says I've got to take you to the hospital."
"What?"
"She's here. She says you're going to die if I don't take you to the hospital."
"I mean...what the..."
You get up and gather his shoes, and while you bend down to put them on his feet--he's not going to put them on himself--he asks sarcastically:
"You mean, you see dead people and my Godmother is one of them?"
"Yes."
"Okay then, Bunny, if that's Jane, ask her what she gave me to drink instead of apple juice that made me cry."
"She says vinegar."
"What?"
"Vinegar."
"Good guess."
"That's not a guess. Jane says we have to go to the hospital."
"But Bunny, Jane is dead."
"I agree."
You take your boyfriend to the hospital. He is admitted for emergency surgery. The doctors who perform the operation say, "He had maybe a day left to live."
Later that night you sleep unsoundly in a chair next to your boyfriend, and have a dream about Jane. She gives you a bowl of Doritos for some reason. She pets your head and says, "You did a good thing."
Now.
You're 30, living in Manhattan. Chinatown, to be specific. It's 3am, and raining. The evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table. You're drunk. You've been drunk for about a month, and because you're the only white person living in your neighborhood, and you're always drunk, it seems as if you've been on one big drug trip--for months now--barreling dizzily through the grimy alleys of some exotic, disgusting, third-world place, communing with rats, pissing in doorways, sliding on the slime that coats the sidewalks, the slime the seeps through the trash bags left for pickup, the slime the seeps out of the bellies of the finless, gutted sharks that are piled high affront the shops.
This place, it's ancient and awful. This is the place of death, poverty, disease. This is the place of murder, rape and torture. Hangings. Stabbings. You name it; it happened here, and its ghosts are not pleasant.
The nightmares, oh they're awful. You don't sleep for days and drink and drink and drink, and then go sliding around the city, barely cognizant, broken from reality, an open knife in your hand. Some nights you don't even know if that person--that one, right there--is a person or a dead person who's resembling a person and seems like a real person. The whole world is turned on its head. No amount of prayer keeps the white bubble up. No deity is powerful enough. New York is too miserable. Nothing keeps the whispers quiet. It's as if you're six again, except there's no jumping into mom's and dad's bed. Not even if you wet your own. There's no justification. There's no escape from the crazy.
There never has been. Not for a moment. Not for a minute of this life.
And so I suppose, this is my very long, elaborate way of telling you that while you may ask me why I am so crazy, I have no answer to give you. I can only say that I never take a breath without mourning the absence of all the things I've never had: a good night's sleep, stability and peace.
Posted by The Bunny at 1:05 AM