Member-only story
The House of my Dreams
Literally.
I have several recurring dreams — er, nightmares. Except for the one in which I’m forced to urinate in front of a bunch of strangers (don’t ask), each of them revolves around a different house.
The first house resembles my family’s house in the small yet bourgeois-y town of Griffin, Georgia. The house was beautiful: a charming blue A-frame with a loft overlooking the living room, a grand kitchen with goldenrod walls, a large master bedroom with two walk-in closets, a powder room, and lots of natural light throughout. It was a luxurious home for sure, the epitome of the upper middle-class homes — before the Great Recession, anyway.
My room had a split-level baseboard and wallpaper with wrenches and hammers. I endured that design atrocity for years and made many attempts to distract from the boyish wallpaper with posters of my favorite movies and teen heartthrobs. We finally made over the room with an oceanic look, using a literal sea sponge to dab white swirls onto the stunning blue walls. Not long after that, we had to move.
I dream about this house often. It stays the same in my memory, but in my nightmares, it hosts a terrifying array of monsters. Not the fanged type, but rather the monsters that were born in me when I lived in that house.
