PSYCHIC MOLESTATION

I slept off my hangover this afternoon and had a sweet dream wherein two cute boys allowed me to lay my head against both of their bare chests as we floated on a raft down the lazy river at a waterpark, watching movies on a laptop computer. One boy took the form of Real Me’s sixth grade crush, a towhead blonde who moved away to Central California before high school, and the other boy appeared as the dark-haired older roommate of a Real World friend of mine. Real Me finds this combo surprising, but Dream Me said the three of us were very close friends. Dream Me felt really guilty about the whole thing, wanted to ask them if it was okay, wanted to apologize, waited for them to tell me that it was weird and gross and that this wasn’t something the three of us did with each other, and that it surely wasn’t something that anyone should ever do with a girl like me at all. They didn’t say any of that, though; the entire dream was totally silent. All I had to work off of was breath and sense. I felt their initial hesitation, the dark-haired older one especially. I was the one who moved to the crook of his shoulder first, the hair on my head touching the hair of his armpit, his hand hovering over my back with drafty trepidation. Then he softened, and dropped into it a little, allowing his fingertips to graze the surface of my skin, until he finally unsuspended himself onto me. I kept my breaths sparse and shallow, waiting to exhale until he shifted or squirmed, worried that any change in temperature or any movement made would remind him where he was and what he was doing, and that it would end. But it did not end, not until I woke up. All the while, the towhead blonde had been quietly watching the action unfold. While sitting up on his elbows to better see the computer screen, he would let his eyes flit over to us every few seconds, the tension breaking in his shoulder blades and neck with each stolen glance. Eventually he acquiesced and lay back down flat, turning his whole head toward me and the dark-haired one for an unbroken stare. This let us know that he was okay, and further into the raft we released. The tacit approval given by the towhead blonde, his acceptance of what all three of us were sharing, only happened because the dark-haired one proved to him that it was okay to see me and touch me in this way, and that if he did it, anybody could find it in themselves to do so as well. I knew that to be true in my nerves, in my instincts, and from looking through history (I realize now that Dream Me could’ve chosen anyone’s history for herself but for some reason chose to use the Real Me’s history instead), and I caught myself feeling sad that the towhead blonde wouldn’t have been able to come to that conclusion on his own, but when the dark-haired one and the towhead blonde made eye contact and softly nodded at each other I knew I had to lean into the blessing without judgment or complaint regardless of how the pieces came together. At that, the dark-haired boy shifted me up slightly, gingerly, like I was a baby asleep, and I decided it was time to roll over to the center of the raft. Digging the base of my palm into his sternum for leverage, I dragged my fingernails through his chest hair until I landed softly between the boys, my eyes pointing now toward the towhead blonde. The towhead blonde looked at me and smiled thinly. We gave it a beat or two, watching each other’s chests rise and fall, and I once again took the initiative to push in closer and press my ear down against his nipple. His chest, unlike the dark-haired boy’s, was hairless, unblemished… The movie-dream froze on this frame until I woke up with a searing stomach ache, cold sweat gluing my breasts to my shirt. Sadness wafted over me, then shame, then disgust. It always happens this way. 

I find these fantasies to be so embarrassing, so fucking embarrasing, but the one stroke of relief I get from them is the fastly fading gratitude that no one can read my mind. This is dirtier than s-e-x. “Ess-Eee-Ex”. Sex. Sex. Sex. It’s saccharine, it’s cloying, this tooth-rotting earnesty, like a Tootsie Roll turning to cement against your gums. I have the libidinal instincts of a haunted broken doll in a charity shop window waiting decades to be bought. I want to be apart of your family. I want to collect dust on your shelf and watch you jerk off. I don’t deserve to think like this, to look out the window sleepily in the back of a cab and imagine as the city speeds by what it may be like to be softly kissed all over my face and neck by someone beautiful on a bed of crispy white sheets. No one featured has ever consented to being apart of this speculative intimacy… if they were ever to find out they’d probably feel more predated upon from this than if I were to admit to dreaming of violently raping them instead. It’s psychic molestation. It’s sick. God forbid I catch my reflection in my phone before it turns on for the first time in the day and my lock screen fades into view after one of these events, because I really don’t need anyone or anything to reinforce to me what it is that I look like. Don’t kick me when I’m down. Finding out what time it is is already hard enough. It’s always too late by the time the haze clears, noon or one PM, the world outside already awkward and bright and loud, reminding me that I’ve wasted my time on the intangible. I can’t get up to go grocery shopping now and my skin smells like salt so I may as well stay in bed and pinch my inner thighs and twiddle with the mats in my hair until the sun goes down and I can drift back to sleep and see the boys again, the boys who would trade me for twenty dollars in the Real World but can stomach seeing me shirtless in a Dream. I’m thankful for their bravery across dimensions and space.