Raft
By Kathryn Lee
It started as mundanely as anything else. My mother was taking a shower in the bathroom. I could hear the water gurgling through the pipes, the drops pelting the plastic curtain as I burrowed into the blankets on the bed we shared. My mother has never cared about textures. Her bedsheets then, as they still are now, are made of thin polyester. Bare skin, like the kind exposed by short-sleeved and short-legged pajamas, constantly slides against the sheets. The further I burrowed, the more I slipped and struggled for sleep. I laid on one cheek and surrendered to the domed ceiling light and its belligerent glow. Somewhere in the haze — in the rhythm of water drops, in the harsh yellow glow of the light, in the restless scratching of my leg against the sheets — I drifted off. Drifted like a raft flowing downstream, a victim to the heartless waves. I surrendered quietly. I know what drifting off to sleep feels like. I do it most nights, aided by a hefty dose of melatonin for an indefinite case of insomnia. The line between waking and sleeping, when the latter is done right, is invisible. This kind of drifting off was different. It was unwilling, unbidden and dramatic. Behind my nose, behind my mouth — where postnasal drip invades amidst spring pollen — there is the sense that everything inside you is shutting down. It is like drowning. No matter how hopeless it is, as you sink deeper and deeper — a cinderblock in the opaque waves — your body makes one last effort to save you. It’s called the instinctive drowning response. Though you are already under the surface — never to be seen again — your body refuses to believe it. Your head snaps back. Your arms flap, akimbo. You die with your eyes facing the cloaked sky, your body wide open and waiting. I dreamt of something before I drifted. The Power Rangers, I think. Whatever a six-year-old could have dreamt of. When I came to, I never really came. I remained lost in the haze — the light beating down on me, the distant thunder of the shower. I was trapped on an exhale. It was like trying to breathe through latex. I screamed for my mother and then realized that nothing had happened. I hadn’t opened my mouth or slid my legs restlessly against the polyester fitted sheet. I’d only thought, intensively and desperately, about calling my mother, and tried to will the action into being. I hadn’t even figured out how to breathe yet.
I don’t dream during these episodes.
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