Nightmares (Chase Miller - New Orleans, LA)

Dreams can be friendly, but they can also be pretty fucking mean. I often have those nightmares of situations that have happened, but they always tend to be a thousand times worse. One moment I’m gleefully slicing through zombies with double-wielding axes like I’m a character in one of the many video games I play, then suddenly I turn around and my family is behind me, thinking maybe they’re my adventuring party and they’re here to help. One moment, a zombie is about to swing at me with its rotten, claw-like fingernails and then my dad jumps in the way to beat it down. Then, he turns around and magically the cemetery battlefield we were in turns into my childhood living room.

What was once a happy moment of my superhero, the one I trust with all my being, has rapidly turned into him screaming at me and I’m doing everything in my power to hold back tears and my own anger, surging through me like an electrical current trying to find it’s open circuit. The circuit is found, and that pain and frustration is spewing out of me. I’m screaming back, I’m crying, I’m telling my dad that I won’t be treated the way he’s handling me. Something snaps in him, and within seconds, I’m against the wall and he has his hands around my neck.

Then I wake up…

…and I’m in tears, pondering why these dreams still haunt me fourteen years later, and desperately wanting them to end.

Many times, I wonder how this strange world mixed with fiction and reality has happened to me. Sometimes, I lay in bed, considering all the possibilities of how my life could have been different if I wasn’t queer, or more likely, pining for a world where the man I trust…trusted…just loved me for the way I was, or am.

But see, the thing about our wildest fantasies is that they’re just that, a fantasy. Something you wish for with all of your soul, but is way less likely to occur than a simple, run-of-the-mill possibility. You can’t just pray that a fantasy will happen, because it won’t. However, that desperate hope for a world you want more than life itself won’t just vanish into thin air, and neither will those nightmares.

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