Disappearing Act

I once had a dream that Cleveland disappeared.  The disturbing thing wasn’t that I had the dream, or that my brain created this violent vision where almost everyone I loved vanished. The disturbing part was that no one cared.  As if Cleveland were toilet paper, and what inhabits it were tiny specks of fecal matter being crumpled, flushed, and filtered.  Normally people would call these nightmares; I quit believing in nightmares when I stopped having dreams.  In my dreams, things vanish, people chase me, some part of me is always being threatened, these are the expectations my sub conscious has for me.  Luckily, I don’t have much to live up to.  Some people get dreams where they are flying, since I believe that is unobtainable for me to do, whether by flapping my arms or being in some type of aircraft, I am glad that the recesses of my brain have set the bar fairly low.

I stopped having “dreams” on anxiety’s Birthday.  Anxiety’s conception starts out like a joke… A man walks into a bar, unfortunately for me; the punch line was a gun to my stomach.  This stranger and I had what I like to call mental intercourse, we created something, and what I consider rather typical, I didn’t get off and he left me to clean up the mess.  The thing about anxiety is that he celebrates his birthday, not once a year, but whenever he fucking pleases.  He will hang balloons while I ride on an elevator, blow out the candles when I have to shower whilst home alone, and open his fucking presents in uncomfortable social settings.  Life with unexpected celebrations can sound rather romantic, but most of the time it causes an invisible chaos.  I have, at times, went to the extreme of showering in my bathing suit with mace and my cell phone right next to the bath tub…which is ironic because most people wear their birthday suit in the shower.  Sometimes I wish that I would disappear like Cleveland did, especially on days like anxiety’s birthday, other times I get mad because I think maybe if I vanished like Cleveland no one would care. Then I would be a fleck of fecal matter and frankly no one wants to feel like a piece of shit.

What is funny about Cleveland disappearing and anxiety posting up and using me as a banquet hall is that these disasters often have to be created for people to love each other, or remotely like each other. Buildings have to crash; grandpas have to die for people to be genuinely kind.  On normal days, when buildings are up, and everyone’s grandpas are still alive, we exchange smug looks, curse people out on the road, look right through the homeless guy on the street, use racism as a crutch to hate for any reason we can find possible.  We often forget how tragically close disaster could be to all of us. We are heartless, like the world is high school and every stranger we see is the nerdy girl with the glasses and the right answer.

I like to think that this is why my brain makes Cleveland disappear.  It is my constant reminder that, in all reality, I will most likely never grow wings and be able to fly, but things can always disappear.  Anxiety can have its birthday in anyone’s life at any given moment.  Everyone has dreams, some may not be so romantically horrible, but not everyone can wake up after their dream so happy that Cleveland is still there, that most people that I love didn’t vanish when I closed my eyes.