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.

“This is about sororities?” Coop dropped his hands from my shoulders and stuffed them in his pockets. “You know that’s elitist bullshit, right? Why would you want to be part of that? It’s literally designed to make you hate yourself—that’s the juice the whole system runs on.”

for all the days of her life, Courtney was going to have to live with herself, locked in the cage of her body with nothing to keep her company but her own brain. And that was a severe punishment if I’d ever heard one.

“Why was it so good here, and so bad? It didn’t matter—whatever I was feeling, it was dialed up so high. Why can’t I make myself feel that way again?

I’m scared college was the last time I was really alive, the way you’re supposed to be, and I’ll never get it back.” “Of course college felt extreme,” Coop said. “You had infinite freedom and almost no responsibility. Nothing was fixed—you had your whole life ahead of you, and it could go anywhere. You had best friends you spent every minute with, so you were never alone. And you were in love. Real love.”

She could feel them pulling away, and feared, as the person at the bottom, that she didn’t have the power to draw them back. What would she have if she no longer had them? The anxiety notched, forming a pit of dread in her stomach. She was certain, on her worst nights, that she would lose them and be alone again. She wanted assurances. She wanted to be close.

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.

one of Jessica’s biggest, earliest flaws is that she swallowed the capitalist, patriarchal system wholesale. She’s so deeply conditioned by the neoliberal idea of what success means: that she has to be the best at everything; that she has to achieve this uncomplicated, unnuanced version of first place in every aspect of her life in order to be valuable. It’s an ugly belief system because it’s ultimately about achieving power and dominance over other people; there’s no room for give and take.