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It’s Sunday, light and airy, and I’m wearing a dress that is just right. It’s soft, short sleeved, it covers enough of my body that I’m warm with the window open, the wind sliding through it so that I feel enveloped rather than entrapped. I wish that I had the ability to grab instances like this, hit pause and stay, in silence, hearing the songs of birds and the wheels of the car that I’ve just watched rolling down the gravel of the mews.
I’ve practiced forms of evasion since I was a child. One could say that I am an expert at looking the other way. “Confront your dreams, that’s the one way to get rid of the bad ones,” my father repeated all throughout my childhood. I hated the words, spoken with resolution, the length of the sentence the exact distance from where I was to where he wanted me to join him.
We’ve both always dreamed a lot, we have nightmares a lot. I once sneaked back into the house late at night as a teenager and heard him stumbling out of bed, pressing his arm against the wall as he ran the length of the hallway towards me until his eyes could tell what was real from what wasn’t.
I’ve never sleepwalked, but I talk, scream, cry in my sleep. At times I wake up with such vast dread that I can almost touch it, like it had the shape of little particles mixing in with the air I breathe in. I never open my eyes and smile at the thought of having won. I avoid the battle, I remember danger, and all I can do is hope that it doesn’t meet my eyes.
This is no different. Scrolling through photographs shouldn’t feel daunting. I grabbed them in piles out of my bedside cabinet about a month ago, to categorise them and ease the process of this project of memories in words and images, moments of my childhood. Ten minutes in, I was overcome with the urge of shoving the photographs back into their corner and closing the door hard on them. I’ve repeated the process several times, unease following like clockwork until I convince myself that nothing is on its way to me, it never is.
Recently I remembered about the coat hanger. Could it be that it had been there in hiding, that I’d chosen not to see it? Once the thought slipped into my mind, I lifted each photograph slowly, sliding it off the next one in case I was right. I found it.
Meet “La Percha” or “The Hanger” in English. It’s right there on the far-left side, standing tall. Luckily, Oma’s focus was on me and her dog Emmi and missed the top of it. Like it’s bottom, it rose in four ovals or two heart-shapes that were its eyes. This is not an easy tale.
La Percha slipped into my dreams when I was around six years old. I remember smiling a lot until then, being as outspoken and mischievous as a child can be, a ball of goofiness and ease. If I had a recollection of dreams and nightmares already, I don’t know. Before La Percha, my only memory of the dark is of me peeking through the wooden beams on the top of my bunkbed to watch Opa strum the guitar or my father sing until my eyes fell closed, hoping to do it all again the next day.
After then, I’m in darkness. I’m at the top of the hallway of my grandparents’ house, everything is quiet and covered in a blueish tint, dark but for a soft moonshine that makes for perfect shadows. All the furniture is there, lifeless except for me standing like I have been placed. I see my legs in my pyjamas and feel the rug under my feet, I hear my name spoken behind me. “Kay” with the “a” and the “y” stretched out, travelling through a voice impossibly shrill. “Hihihihi,” then, playfully deranged and childlike, no malice, just a lack of awareness. I see its heart shaped eyes from the corner of mine. I can feel its excitement growing the more aware I am of its presence, the more dread that I feel.
I start running. It follows behind me, swaying from side to side, stretching out its wooden sticks and mimicking what it would look like if it could tickle the sides of my stomach. It craves it. It wants to. I never see it, I just know it. Like instructions planted in my mind: I must make it to the bottom of the hallway before it catches up with me, lay on the rug face down, and press my arms as tight as possible to my sides. I must lay in wait for the floor to swallow me down and under into an endless pit of comfortable darkness before it can reach its sticks out to touch me, until I am safely deposited back on top of my bed.
La Percha never caught up with me, but it broke me. I replaced loud excitement with quiet ponderings, laughter with soft but long tearful fits, and the need to have my back pressed against a wall to feel safe. After a couple of nights dreaming the same nightmare, I understood that it had come to stay and did everything I could not to drift to sleep. The second that I did, La Percha was there, right behind me, waiting to play. For four years, not one night would go by without me there, at the top of the hallway, running away from that thing that wanted to touch me, have fun with me like I was nothing but a toy without the power to say no.
Reminiscing about my childhood thereafter, bright memories come with shadows, every moment remembered carries that little bit of anguish trailing right behind it. Dread can be defining, in the same way that every thread that rolled out from this tied itself around me so many times, so tightly, that when I managed to untangle them it was too late. Their pressure left marks imprinted on my skin that I’ll hold with me forever.