In the Dream House

by Carmen Maria Machado

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it. —Zora Neale Hurston

Your mind indeed is tired. Your mind so tired that it can no longer work at all. You do not think. You dream. Dream all day long. Dream everything. Dream maliciously and incessantly. Don’t you know that by now? —Patrick Hamilton, Angel Street

try to imagine the things that have happened inside. I wouldn’t recommend it. But you could. No one would stop you.

And when we die, our bodies feed the hungry earth, our cells becoming part of other cells, and in the world of the living, where we used to be, people kiss and hold hands and fall in love and fuck and laugh and cry and hurt others and nurse broken hearts and start wars and pull sleeping children out of car seats and shout at each other. If you could harness that energy—that constant, roving hunger—you could do wonders with it. You could push the earth inch by inch through the cosmos until it collided heart-first with the sun.

You made a fool of yourself, in more ways than one. I thought you died, but writing this, I’m not sure you did.

Your female crushes were always floating past you, out of reach, but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time.