I have been having horrible nightmares again.  Like the really sucky kind that wake you up sweaty and unable to breathe and not because it’s 108 degrees outside.  They happen from the moment I close my eyes and they wake me up multiple times a night despite the copious amount of trail mix I take.  Sometimes I have the same ones over and over with slight variations… My age, locations, time, place….one of the same dreams I had over and over again as a kid.  The world is coming to an end.  Not my world “The World”. Or, as they speak of it in the book of revelations “the rapture”.

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to read to my brother and I out of the bible and my brother always! Always! Always! Wanted her to read the book of revelations- and she always did.  And it scared the shit out of me- and gave me nightmares!  If you think about it- there’s a lot of scary shit in the bible- I mean it had to end sometime- and the rapture is pretty damn dramatic!  And scarier than any movie I’ve ever seem- but all over the bible there are like burning bushes, and people rising from the dead, getting eaten by whales and shit…that’s some serious scary shit for a kid!   

I digress…as a kid, the whole rapture, mark of the beast and Satan here on earth (like other than my parents) was scary as fuck!  And I would have nightmare after nightmare about the world ending- and in every single one of them- I was always left behind.  And it sucked!   So one night in my dream my grandmother actually met me at the door and in the middle of the “rapture” said to me, “Grace, this is not a dream.”. She said this is not a dream- in my fucking dream! I am not even joking! How does that happen?  Well, it happened- and I was shocked as fuck when I woke up and didn’t have a 666 tattooed somewhere on my 8 year old body so I could make it through the 7 years of tribulation without starving to death or getting my head cut off, or something equally gruesome that an 8 year old mind can imagine – but nothing worse than the new testament!  

Well, the end of the world dreams are back…and they are just as scary.  And I am left behind every single time….AGAIN!  It happened again last night- it was the second nightmare I had and I was so scared when I woke up I actually had to go check on my kids…yes! To see if they were still there.  (I never said any of this was rational- it was 1:11am!). Maybe it’s happening again because I think about death ALL the time.  And I get scared.  The heaviness in my chest is both emotional and physical – it keeps me from taking in in a full breath.  

Its like this giant ball of emotional wreckage.  It hurts to the core of my being.   It makes me want  to scream and fold myself up in a ball and never touch another person again in my life, but at the same time I want to hug the first person I see and never let go – to just cling to them until everything I feel; all the love, all the anger, all the bitterness…everything I have gone through, everything everyone I love has gone through, has flowed out through the pores of my skin; maybe then I’d finally feel like my lungs could hold air again.

I was recently surrounded by about 20 of my friends and we were all talking and laughing and hanging out and I was suddenly so overwhelmed I had to leave the room…and I wondered what that picture would be like without me in it.  I just locked myself in the bathroom and quietly cried and just listened…to the chatter, to the laughter…to life.  Until I heard a knock at the door and a voice quietly ask, “Grace, it’s Lis…are you okay?” yeah, I am okay. 

I have never been so desperate to live…I just don’t want my world to end.