In the Dream House

by Carmen Maria Machado

You have always adored driving great distances across your country: it is the only time you ever feel any kind of patriotism.

When she shows you the undergraduate dining hall, which basically looks like Hogwarts, you keep thinking to yourself: Maybe I should have gone to Harvard? Maybe I should have applied? You keep thinking back to why you applied to the colleges you did, and you remember—for the first time in years—that you chose your college list almost completely at random. You wanted to go to a city and you wanted to get out of Pennsylvania; those were the only two criteria. You wish you could accurately describe the bone-deep ache of walking on that campus, the too-late realization that you’d fucked up your whole life by not having sufficient ambition. Who are you? You are nobody. You are nothing.

Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.

You were all mind; anxiety was your lifeblood, your fuel. You were young. You didn’t know your mind could be a boon and a prison both; that someone could take its power and turn it against you.

When I was a child, my parents—and then, learning from their example, my siblings—loved to refer to me as “melodramatic,” or, worse, a “drama queen.” Both expressions confused and then rankled me. I felt things deeply, and often the profound unfairness of the world triggered a furious, poetic response from me, but while that was cute when I was a toddler, neither thing—feeling, responding to feeling—aged well. Ferocity did not become me.

you realize she belongs to your neighbor, who is also coincidentally your therapist (Iowa City!).

Was it the arc of the universe? The natural result of centuries, millennia of wrongheaded politics? Was she trained to find you, or were you trained to be found? Was it the fact that you’d already been tenderized like a pork chop by: never having been properly in love, being told you should be grateful for anything you get as a fat woman, getting weird messages that relationships are about fighting and being at odds with each other? The fact that your heart had been broken that one time and you desperately wanted to feel it unbreak? That you felt complete with someone loving you? That you just straight-up loved being desired, desiring someone, coming all the time? That you got addicted to her smell, her voice, her body? That you figured this was what you deserved? The superpredictable result of a religion that pathologized sex but never talked about relationships? Terrible sex ed? Bad timing? You feel as if there is a box you can open to find the answer, but with the lid closed the answer is all of these things, all at once.

When you try to talk about the Dream House afterward, some people listen. Others politely nod while slowly closing the door behind their eyes; you might as well be a proselytizing Jehovah’s Witness or an encyclopedia peddler.49 Kind to you in person, what they say to others makes its way back to you: We don’t know for certain that it’s as bad as she says. The woman from the Dream House seems perfectly fine, even nice. Maybe things were bad, but it’s changed? Relationships are like that, right? Love is complicated.50 Maybe it was rough, but was it really abusive? What does that mean, anyway? Is that even possible? You will never feel as desperate and fucked up and horrible as you do when you hear those things.

It was terrible because I wanted to believe that my love was unique and my pain was unique, as all of us do.

But that nagging sense of doubt was so profound they eventually gave it a name: Nonstalgia (noun) The unsettling sensation that you are never be able to fully access the past; that once you are departed from an event, some essential quality of it is lost forever. A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.