Me Too

I don’t know when the dreams began, but they were reoccurring throughout my childhood.

They always ended the same: I struggled to climb up a steep, slanted staircase. At the bottom of the narrow passageway, was a giant mustache — handlebar style. All thick and black and larger than life.

I knew that if I lost my footing and slipped down the stairs, the mustache was waiting to tickle me.

The origin of this dream has always confused me. I still do not know why it came to me, over and over again.

The not knowing still bothers me.

When I was in 3rd grade, I ran across the playground during recess with my friends. We had been picking daisies in the field behind the school.

A group of construction workers were replacing sprinklers nearby. They were ripping through the earth with their tools. Dust, torn grass, and holes.

As I passed, one of them turned toward me and whistled, “Hey toots,” he leered. I ran faster. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands.

What I really wanted to do was wash away icky feeling left in the pit of my stomach whenever I remembered the image of his sideways grin.

In 7th grade, as history class was ending, the boy in the seat next to me got up, stood near my desk and demanded a kiss. When I politely declined, he pulled a gun out of his backpack and held it to my skull. I leaned back.

“Give me a kiss, he said.”

I felt the cold steel touch my throat. I offered up warm lips to oblige.

I never told my parents. I never told anyone until much later. I never knew if the gun was loaded.

In 8th grade, I was walking back from gym class to change, and passed near the locker rooms. A classmate who was at least a foot and a half taller than me, grabbed my arm, twisted it, and pushed me into the boy’s locker room. He pressed himself against me. His breath in my face. Forced his mouth onto mine.

And let me go.

In the summer before high school, I had a stalker who was significantly older than me. He would come around my house every night. Sing at the top of his lungs. Burn candles in front of my bedroom window. Write messages along the canal where I’d walk to school in the morning. Talk about things I had had no knowledge of, until then.

That was in childhood.

For so many of us, that is where it begins.

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