Woke up from a dream. A man's hand lunging for my throat was the last thing that I remembered.
In the beginning
I was on a bus, and the bus driver was driving a city bus down a large open highway, and the bus was busy. I was sitting at the back left on the second of the front-facing two double seats. I was people watching, and there was this very pretty woman with a sucker in her mouth and she was sitting on the right side down the steps. She was tall, had shoulder length hair that was straight, and had a face with strong features. Like a 1960's, 70's french woman.
She was talking to her mother about something, and she started to cry. Not just a regular cry, but making the exact sounds of a baby crying. She cried and cried, and the mother got fed up and couldn't calm her down. The mother was shorter, a little plump, and moved to the back of the bus. She sat in the row beside mine on the opposite side and looked like she was about to cry herself. She looked out the window, then looked at her daughter, and looked out the window. I could see the light pool into the creases and lines on her face. She was distraught and embarrassed because of what the her daughter couldn't help doing. I thought the woman's daughter was a little slower than usual, and really empathized with her mom because she was still acting so unruly at an older age (older than 20, but less than 30) when she should know better, or maybe been in someone else's care.
The mother got off the bus, and the daughter came to sit in front of where the mother sat. She was wearing a short white skirt, and blue canvas shoes and white socks. She kept playing with her feet and swinging around her long legs. She struck me as a person who was completely in control of her inhibitions. Beside her sat a stern looking woman with a weird skin growth on the right side of her neck. It was like five or six medium sized black holes were dented into her. They were so big she could have stuck her finger in them.
The woman with holes in her neck was talking to the woman who had been crying and she said, "You're going to tell your mother that the doctor said that you have these uncontrollable fits, and you'll lose no range of movement or energy."
The crying woman agreed, and smiled, and I knew that she was faking the whole thing. I felt terrible for the mother who had been embarrassed, and I told myself I was going to follow her off of the bus when it stopped. I debated with myself about not going and following her, but this woman's mother was going to be experiencing unneeded embarrassment for the rest of her life, and I felt obligated to do something.
The bus was driving very sporadically, and there were few people on this bus now. Me, the crying woman, and a few other men. The crying woman was standing at the front of the bus hanging onto a pole. Her white skirt kept rising higher and higher on her legs. Whether she was doing this on purpose or not, she didn't seem to care about being decent in public. It rose above her leg and everyone on the bus saw the back of her underwear.
In spite of myself, I found this really very attractive even though it was so bizarre. I had to hold myself in the seat and remind myself that this woman was deceiving her mother and I shouldn't even think about liking her. I also at the same time wondered why the men who were standing on the bus behind her didn't seem to notice what she was doing or care when I kept craning my neck to look at her.
She got off the bus, and I missed getting off, and I was stuck on it. The bus driver kept speeding and lurching forward even worse than before. He was racing a yellow school bus, and it became like night instantly. It was grey, blue, and foggy outside. We were driving through a thick smoky fog beside a football stadium while still on the highway, and people kept tossing eggs at the busses. The bus driver would try to get hit by the eggs and subsequently speed up and slow down. I kept gripping the seat in front of me as we went up and down hills, and swerved for the rest of the ride.
***
I was off the bus, and I was in a room. It was my room, and the room that the girl on the bus lived in. We were roommates. It was in hotel room style, and there were two queen beds facing on the west wall, a long table on the east wall, which had two teacups on it. I remember that I was drinking green tea from her teacup, so I finished it, then put it back hoping she wouldn't know it was used.
I knew that the girl wasn't going to come back for awhile, so I saw her nametag on the wall above her teamug. I tried to write down her name, but it was difficult. I couldn't write down the letters correctly, and the sign was confusing. It was as if someone had coloured a piece of white paper with marker in big patches of back and forth streaky movements. There were little marker drawings, and her name was written with parts crossed out and rewritten. I figured that was because my friend was supposed to be my roommate, but she wasn't anymore. I grabbed a piece of paper and tried to write down her name. I think it was spelt varverundy or something that started with a v followed by a series of random letter combinations.
At this moment I realized that I was probably dreaming, or had the thought that I was likely dreaming. In the dream I remembered reading something in my waking life that said dream writing was difficult to do, and was often a sign that you were dreaming. I didn't dwell on this thought for long, and continued trying to figure out the letters instead of waking myself up.
I finally seemed to make sense of the sign when she walked in the room with a pale guy who was similar in age. He wavy short dark hair, dark thick eyebrows, and was wearing black jeans and a grey black sweater and shirt. He became immediately inquisitive.
"What were you doing?"
"I was just writing a note to Rachel, (I knew her name but I forget it now, so I'm just using Rachel) but I don't need to give it to her because you're here now," I said crumpling up the page and shoving it in my pocket.
The guy came up to me, and almost looked as if he wanted to grab the paper from me and I contemplated stuffing it into my bra. We stared at each other for a few seconds. The guy went through all of my stuff that was on the long table and sat down on my bed facing the girl. I was standing in between the two beds, and she was standing on the other side of her bed unpacking and organizing her things out of a suitcase.
"Dad" and "it", you should really get these poems submitted for approval," he said to me in a snarky tone.
"It sucks, but I guess that's the price I have to pay for being homicidal (referring to herself, and suicidal (she said this referring to me)."
I was unaware that I was in some sort of in-patient treatment centre up until that point, and I figured that her motives for keeping her mental illness going was because she had killed someone.
I sat on my bed, and I took the papers and shoved them under my pillow. The guy asked me why I did that, and what I was hiding. I got the impression that he was trying to protect her, and they were in on the scheme together.
I shrugged it off, and the girl came over and sat across from me on her bed. I said to her, "I wanted to tell you something. I've been a lot of places and I've never felt closer to someone as a roommate than I have to you." I knew that I was lying, but Rachel thought I was sincere and was very touched. She said something again about how it was probably because we were both so crazy.
She went back to doing what she was doing before, unpacking and organizing. The guy really wanted to know what I had under my pillow, and what I was so afraid to show him. I took out the paper, and started to explain that I folded up these blank pieces of paper in a little book format to make something out of. He seemed relieved and said, "That's it?"
I said, "No." I decided to come clean about writing her name down, but I veiled it in another lie. I said I wrote down her name so that I could remember it for the future because we were roommates, and I never really remember the full name of any of the roommates I've had.
The man became violently angry, and knew that I was onto both of them. He swung his fists at me, and I ran away from the bed. He was overcome by anger, and fell to the floor shaking with something that might have been a seizure. His face was contorted and he had thick clear drool pooling from his mouth and onto the floor. I was frightened of him even more than I had been before. He sprung up, and I ran around the front of Rachel's bed. She had half-collapsed on the floor and was leaning against the wall making weird throaty noises. She was legitimately scared, but I was certain she was faking her sounds to continue her story.
The room
I ran through the doors at the back, and I slammed one door shut. Rachel was calling for her mother who was behind me in the kitchen, but everything was happening so suddenly. He was running through the open door at me with his hands lunging towards my throat, and then I woke up. My body was frozen, and I laid there trying to move it for a few seconds.
