The People Behind My Eyes

Wash Water: A Dream - Friday, May 26, 2006 – 12:24 noon EST

I was still in college and stood at the counter of a popular bakery listening to an ex-psychiatrist tell me how nasty my cinnamon buns are. After that humiliation I went to some gay bar where I fell asleep standing up in the men’s restroom for 4 hours. I was leaning on the wall of the stall with the door open as I stood wearing only a shirt, sleeping. When I woke up I started putting the toiletries that I brought w/ me back into a 80’s style denim purse. The purse wasn’t that big but it fit an alarm clock, a large bottle of lotion and a ton of other stuff that normally wouldn’t fit in one of those purses. None of the men in the restroom found it strange that I was sleeping against the wall or that I was the only female in there. I was the only female until I walked out and passed another black woman. Before the appearance of the other black woman I was the only black person in that dream. (that same bar use to be a recurrent dream theme but it hasn’t been for many years now and to my knowledge I haven’t dreamed of sleeping while standing up or the thing with the purse until now. but that same gay bar in that same location use to be something I dreamed about all the time.)

When I finally returned to the dorm I realized that I had nothing clean to wear to class the next day. Like usual I got side tracked and kept forgetting to do the laundry. I ran around visiting and playing w/ Captain (who I did not have while in college.) Every time I went into the hallway of my dorm more and more students piled square baskets of laundry in the hallway. Each time I went in the hallway the amount of laundry (all colour loads) increased by about 5 or 6 baskets. It got to the point that I could hardly pass to get to the elevator to get downstairs to continue my course of laundry avoidance.

In that dream I never got my laundry done the same as I’ve not gotten my laundry done for the last few days. It’s piling up beyond belief. There seems to be more and more every time I turn around. It takes a heck of a lot for us to get dressed because we have to decide who is dressing us that day. Therapy appointments are the worst because mostly we want to wear our safe outfit but others want to venture into their own style. We have these apparel conflicts quite often but for certain on therapy days. Trying on this and that then tossing it to the floor to try on a 4^th or 5^th outfit is not uncommon around here. Sometimes we settle on a mix of Joan and Robert which makes us look rather butch but most often we wear what Joan wants to wear. That always includes a baseball cap. Even if we wear Joan’s clothes we still have a pile of clothes we tried on and tossed on the floor. There is still a pile of discarded outfits that we’ve not picked up from when we tried them on for therapy then settled on the safe outfit.

Even though we dress as Joan or Robert we always have our token and the majority of the time we bring Captain when we leave the house. So even if a person doesn’t win the clothing war they at least have some sort of safety back up.

Needless to say I have a bunch of laundry to do, towels & whites but mostly there are endless colour loads.

Austin's August