There’s a woman in my head, and I want to run from her.

There’s a woman in my head, and she has holes in her face. When idle, the holes are gaping black holes, punched into beige skin, aligned adjacent to contorted eyes of tangible darkness, dank black caverns, embroidered with dull diamonds that glimmer uncannily. She doesn’t have ears or a nose, but spindly, boneless arms that constantly droop over my eyelids.

She only appears in my dreams and this is simply because she is a coward. When I am not conscious, she visits me and her laugh sounds like the sharp whistling of a stopping train. Her flesh feels like that of a broken aluminum soda can, jagged and hard to grab. Her tears taste like boiled blood and salt. She smiles sickly, taming her lips to terrify me and I feel my heartbeat inflect to a maximum, not from petrifaction, but from stunned amazement of her being. Her holes tell tales of life, miniature portraits of movies, each unique to her on a particular evening.

I don’t want to watch her movies, but they’re enticing. Each story, despite the genre, is painted vividly and I wish to hold the unknown colors in the palms of my hands and let their shades seep through the fissures of my fingers. I wish to allow these dyes to smother the world in a different light, and to let her know that she is the source of something greater than she could ever imagine. Once revealing my secret, my furtive admiration for her, she dips into one of her wells and removes a color coated finger and extends it to me. But I deny, cordially, of course.

There’s a woman in my head, and I want to run from her.

There’s a woman in my head, and when she arrives here, she always wipes the bottoms of her shoes on the mat of my sanity. I often wonder where she has been all day, but she does not entertain my questions because she is usually preoccupied. Once, she was running up and down a vacant soccer field with an orange extension cord. The cord never ended and she never grew tired. Another time, she sat rocking in a velvet chair beside a blazing fire, consumed and concentrated on her environment. The evening after that, she threw herself into the pits of the inferno, and yet, she still returned the next day unscathed.

She only calls me “Dreamer”, and this is simply because it is all she knows me as. She cannot refer to me as anything else, and for this, I am grateful. She likes to sing to me but her melodies usually consist of screeching words of hatred and harm. They comfort me in my unconsciousness. She tells me this is all I’ll ever know. I believe her. She once asked me in an oppressive tone why I prayed to “God” (whoever that is, she said) before I entered my slumber. I didn’t want to answer her, but she stared at me with those diamond eyes and I succumbed to a truth I had not realized while awake.

I don’t want to believe her, but she’s enticing. She captures my attention and makes me understand unwanted certainties. She leaves her poltergeist in the corners of my mind so that when she is gone, I can still remember what she has showed me. She is devilish and I enjoy each moment of it while my eyes are shut. When they are open, however, I choke myself into a terrified state and I fear the place where she resides. Instead of revisiting the contours of her face, I keep my eyes wide open and allow them to travel the four white walls of my bedroom over and over again until the fluorescent green lights of my clock read 5:00 AM and an obnoxious alarm sounds in my ears. From there, I move as a phantom through hallways, and relentlessly wait for evening when I know I can no longer avoid her.

There’s a woman in my head, and I want to run from her.

I want to run from her so badly, until the cemented pavement clashes with the ancient brown grass of emptied farmlands. I want to run until Boston becomes San Francisco, until San Francisco becomes Hong Kong, until Hong Kong turns back into Boston. I want to run until black turns to white, until Heaven meets Earth, until sunsets become a tangible reality. I want to run until her melodies become nothing but silent reveries of an antique dream, until her dull diamonds lose their glimmer, until her orange extension cord runs out, until the blazing fire in the fireplace alongside of the velvet red chair disappear into an unfamiliar abyss.

There’s a woman in my head, and I want to run from her, but it’s impossible to run when the monster’s inside.


It’s even more impossible to run when the monster is you.