Skyler J. Keiter-Massefski

content warning: suicide

DREAMSCAPE

“The findings paint a troubling picture of the impact of stigma and discrimination on the health
of many transgender people ... Among the starkest findings is that 40% of respondents have
attempted suicide in their lifetime — nearly nine times the attempted suicide rate in the U.S.
population (4.6%).”

-Report of the 2015 United States Transgender Survey

i.

The nightmares began soon
after she died (dream-friend-lover,
almost-heart-holder), night after
night on repeat in my mind:

ashes dispersed in a vast
ocean swirling together to
form a body once more. Rising
up from the abyss, dust becomes
bone becomes blood
becomes flesh (becomes
breath).

Death lives for a brief
shining moment again:
smiling and reaching her
hand to meet mine – but
shatters into ash the instant
that our fingers touch,
floating back to her
watery crypt.

Her body sustains
new life in the sea –
I dread the dark and the shattering
lurking in dreamscapes.

No dancing, no
grieving (only a single
sob/scream in a solitary
sanctuary). All in order,
all in control, everything for a
single goal: don’t fall
apart, don’t become her.

Breaking is dying as
dream-figure warns –
be afraid of the shattering,
of ending
too soon

(don’t die,
stay alive,
resist the temptation
of suicide).

ii.

The nightmares returned when
my body began to shut down: confined
to an ever-narrowing set of four
walls (an ever-intolerable
awareness of embodied entrapment),
dreamscape with a terrifying twist.

dream-friend-lover
becomes a self-portrait whose
eyes open in terror to realize
they cannot close the widening
cracks, cannot prevent the impending
splintering into the sum of their parts.

Sleep turns into impossibility and
self-annihilation threatens
as inevitability – a false
equivalence forms,

why must breaking
also mean dying?

Even in pieces, there is still
life. Even when shattered,
there is still life.

She shatters into dust and
ash, ghost of the undertow
drawing me into her salty
void (she doesn’t know
that I cannot drown, the ocean
fortifies as it destroys) – I shatter
into pills scattered on
the bathroom floor,

landlocked from my
beloved sea.

iii.

Dream-friend comes
in the night, body no longer
tenuously comprised, no
ashen fragments nor shining
perfection always
destined to break (she
comes to give
not only to take).

Traced and marked
in death as life, scarred
hands reach out over
impossible breadth; meet
at last and finally draw
near (whispered forgiveness
in her ear).

For once I awaken
without fear, no
terror now the worst has
passed. In this life after
death or life after life, I
learn to add instead of subtract;

touch the scars gently, tattooed
tenderness reverently: give thanks
for the body bearing life past
all odds (there is so much grace
in the breaking this time).