The Mishaps

The elevator closing on my legs and dragging me up until my legs break, tear, and bleed.

New Years Eve, from 2011 to 2012. Friends talking about a suicide, how the remaining body resembled an accordion. I've awoken from day dreams at night, clutching onto my blanket with my toes and hands, shaking my head, no no. In my dreams, she falls from the window she is swinging her legs out of, her toes bare and stretching as if under beach sand, but the snow blows in. I dream that she'll slip from my fingers, from the window sill, like a dream unremembered, like a hallucination that never was. And I wake up from that nightmare and hold onto her with all that I have: my sheets, my shirt, my hands forming into clammy fists. But she didn't fall. She-could-have is what scares me.

Bumping into a body from another dimension as if bumping into kids in a high school hallway.


These are the things I fear.