In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

by Ashley Winstead

Hierarchy, that was normal. What was strange was how deeply you could come to need it; how eventually, over enough time, you would long for someone to come and put you in your place.

“The law is nuanced and complicated, and I like nuanced and complicated. Plus, knowing the law helps me break it better.

“That sounds lonely. You have to let people in. Let them love you for who you are, the good and the ugly. Then you know it’s real.”

Either way, he didn’t understand that there were some truths too ugly to see the light of day. Some that would ruin love, if they were uncovered.

Memories are powerful things. But—and this is important, my therapist said—so are the dark spaces. The things you choose, consciously or not, to repress. Always, they’re the things you need protection from. The too much: too terrifying, too shameful, too devastating. The things that, if allowed, would threaten the very core of who you’re supposed to be. It turns out the real you is a quilt, made up of the light and the dark. The life you’ve lived in sunshine and your shadow life, stretching underneath the surface of your mind like a deep underwater world, exerting invisible power. You are a living, breathing story made up of the moments in time you cherish, all strung together, and those you hide. The moments that seem lost.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?