"I'm Not Crazy"

XIV.

In the dream, I was a Gardner. I wasn't necessarily good at it, because gardens need space and low income Los Angeles apartments aren't made to provide that type of space. The sun has always been much too warm, and the shade has always been equally as sparse. I had my porch though, and like many of my neighbors, I had managed to spread out some pots and trays for leafy green plants and flowers to grow.

I was new to the gardening scene, obviously. Most of my plants were small and frail. They hadn't quite reached the stage of life where the collective exhale could begin. I was still holding my breath tight with hope that my sprouts would root and strengthen. All of the dreamscape flowers were like that except for one, a hydrangea bush.

That's how I knew it had to be a dream. The poeticism of a single flourishing plant was all too telling, especially in November.

But I loved it. I loved it so much that I could feel the ache in my dream heart. In the dream, I was conscious of the love. I was aware of the hours I'd spent trimming and watering and shoving the heavy pot out into the morning sun. It was laborious and gentle love. I was a mother.

It had an old ramshackle looking pot, and big flourishing leaves that overflowed its edges. The flowers were in bloom out of season, pink and purple and bundled together in a burst of color against the leaves. It was the type of thing I could find myself looking at for hours in admiration. In the dreamscape, it was a task I knew I'd treasure.

And then the flowers were clipped. I do not know the person who did it, although I knew them intrinsically. They were faceless, without features, but the marionette of myself in the dream had a knowledge of their existence. It was a familiar facelessness, an energy that I was accustomed to.

The faceless person clipped away my flowers and chopped leaves away messily at their stems. She presented her cuttings to me with open palms, and I stared on in horror at the severed limbs of my baby.

"Why?" I choked in the dreamscape.

"To grow more," she answered, as if I should have known.

I was supposed to look on into her destruction and see the potential for new life, a spread of roots and an outward growth away from the original home.

I trembled, and then I sobbed. My marionette body was wracked with waves of pain. I felt a grief beyond measure. As I looked through my tear soaked eyes, I knew those marred edges she'd cut could never possibly grow. Roots would not set. The flowers would wilt and die. This has been destruction, not tending. My babies had been killed. It had been a massacre.

I woke from such devastation with confusion soaking through my bones. I did not often dream, which I was told could be a side effect of my medications. Most of the time I simply closed my eyes and woke up what felt like moments later. Everything that happened in the night seemed to hide from my conscious thoughts, but not the memory of those fictional flowers. I could almost still feel their pain.

Even as I went about my day hours later, I still couldn't shake away the memories. They sat at the forefront of my mind, distracting me from the present.

"I'm going to up your dose," the psychiatrist was saying.

I looked up.

"It's not a bad thing," he added, and I could see in his well lined face that he'd perceived some sort of tension in me at his first statement. "You've been on a stagnant dosage for over a year now, and it was always in the plan for us to reevaluate after you'd had a chance to get settled in the new city. Think of it as an adjustment of support for you."

"But I feel fine," I interjected, which I suppose was an objective thing to say.

Fortunately, the psychiatrist has seemingly prepared to respond to my objectivity.