After the End: The Squirrel

When I was four, I dreamt every night a wolf was coming to eat me. I lived in terror of the coming night and when put to bed, I pulled my eyelids open with my hands and begged the Universe to permit me not to sleep. Every night my pleas were denied and I'd dream it again. And again.

I remember begging to be allowed to stay up. I remember being yelled at for doing so. I remember being spanked a lot with a belt. I stopped asking. But I couldn't give in to sleep. I'd creep from my room, down the dark hallway to the living room on hands and knees. As I approached the end of the hall and the door to the living room, I'd slink lower, and lower, making myself smaller, the closer I got to the warmth of the light, the sight of my parents settled in on the coach, the sound of them talking and the television burbling. I yearned. I couldn't go back to my room. I couldn't go any further forward. I lay on the floor at the end of the hallway, desperately silent, desperately small, and I wept without any sound, trapped.

I fell into a lifelong pattern of severe depression at age six, but there in the hallway at age four, was when I first experienced it, the hopelessness of being pinned between two flavors of loss.

If you asked me then what I wanted to be when I grew up, I'd have answered I wanted to be a squirrel. High above the dogs and wolves, of course, but more than that, they were motive, antic, playful, watchful, and simple. They leapt and ran. They were nimble. They were free.