Dreams – Macy Craig

November 7, 2025

I feel like a baby reaching up and grasping for its mother, like somebody just after jumping off the side of their apartment building, reaching out as if there was some branch to hold, but of course there isn’t because it’s an apartment building but this isn’t an apartment building it’s a hospital room and I’m convinced they make these things as harsh as possible because there’s no reason these lights have to be so bright and the machines are constantly beeping so loud and whirring and they’re speaking in place of Greta and I just want to hear her voice and hear her say, I LOVE YOU AND IT’S ALL GONNA BE OKAY, but in the days leading up to today she would talk to me less and less and I kept wondering, WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING WRONG?, and now that she’s here, so peaceful with her eyes closed, I don’t know if she’ll ever talk to me again, and if she doesn’t I can’t blame her, and that’s the kind of thinking that made me decide that I couldn’t be there in that room anymore, just trying to catch my thoughts, so I walk out into the hallway and dodge all the nurses and patients who are stumbling against their IV drip bags and walk back into the lobby where the nurses said it would be more peaceful, but I just see a lot of people like me, not sleeping and rocking back and forth and rubbing their hands against their temples, and I don’t want to see them or be near them so I take the stairs down from the seventh floor to the fourth because I’ve always liked the number four and my Mom would tell me that something was wrong with me because I would always walk on the lines of the tiles on the floors and I’m walking on the lines again and telling myself that Greta will slip away if I don’t, so maybe Mom was right and there is something wrong with me but I don’t think I can take that consideration now or anything into consideration, for that matter, so I try to push through everything or find something softer to land on, but when you fall you can’t really pick that kind of thing, and I fall on making dinner two weeks ago, the night before she stopped talking to me, which is funny because I’ve lived so long in this moment, yet now I remember something I hadn’t realized, when Greta was looking over the box of mac and cheese I felt her staring at me but didn’t look up and made a grunt noise so she would look away, and now that I’m recreating it in my mind and can see everything and I’m realizing now how soft her eyes were and how loudly she was crying out for help, but I didn’t notice it then, and I hate this cycle of remembering and want it to stop, and so, impulsively, before I even realize what I am doing, punch myself in the chest and feel the air and the guilt leave my body and suddenly I feel so naked on the fourth floor landing and don’t know what to do, so I run away, push the door open and see that everything is darker, and it smells more like lavender than antiseptic, it looks more like a coffee shop than a hospital lobby, and there’s a bald, old man sitting there with a white beard and half-marathon t-shirt who smiles at me and asks me if he can help me get where I am going, and I try to be nice and tell him I don’t know where I am going but it comes out as, WHO ARE YOU?, and he introduces himself as Paul, and says that he is here for his granddaughter’s chemotherapy and I nod and start walking but he gets up and takes my arm and asks me what is wrong and I pull away and tell him it doesn’t matter, so he apologizes and sits back down and tells me that he can help me get where I am going if I ever need, that he’s here this time three days a week, but that upsets me further and I yell at him about how I wasn’t able to drop Greta off at work this morning and that it was my fault that everything happened, and he just stares at me and wishes me well and I walk away, embarrassed by how naïve I used to be, that I used to believe things like people just wanting to help, and would get burned all the time for it, because they were always doing things for themselves, but I’m okay with that because I remember that was when I met Greta while she was a barista in college, and I was just about to start school at the University of Saint Thomas, so I was scared shitless, but she was so beautiful, her red hair barely hit her shoulders and she smiled like she was laughing at you, but her eyes were soft enough that you knew there was no way she was capable of inflicting pain, and that’s why I love Greta, and I hope to see her eyes again, recreate that moment when I asked her out and she said, JESUS, HOW OLD ARE YOU? and I lied, so she took my number on the back of my latte receipt and texted me the address of her favorite library, and we went there and had a generally good time and a generally bad time through college after she graduated, and I was still a sophomore, because she was traveling as a credit card system salesman, and I would be jealous in the way children are, but we made it through and fell in love for real and fell out of love for real the way people do but always ended up in the same apartment next to the co-op together, because that’s the way life worked for us and I think she was happy but I could never really tell because I spent a lot of time at the office and the rest of my time trying to decode my own head and barely had any time to look into hers, and thank Christ we didn’t have children because one of us would have probably have done that thing that depressed people do where they drown their children in the bathtub to be free and live life the way that they have always wanted to, and I don’t think you’re supposed to say that but I think a lot more people do have those thoughts and just refuse to share them because they’re afraid of what it might mean, but you have to at some point accept the way you think doesn’t mean shit because humans are always trying out ideas, thinking about robbing banks to pay rent and killing people to keep secrets but we decide not to do those things before we even register them as ideas, so I guess in some ways we are deeply good creatures, in that we can make those decisions, but now I’m thinking through everything, and my legs drag at every window because I’m imagining falling or floating or finding some space where I can breathe, and I realize I’ve been holding my breath, so I start counting them out like I was taught to while playing the trumpet in marching band, back when my steps where highly choreographed and I could just do whatever the hell I wanted to, but now when I bleed, I bleed everywhere and there is no one to call because I should be old enough to cauterize wounds by myself, and I realize now that I have no idea where I am and that there are skyways connecting different buildings to each other and I must have taken one at some point but I can’t remember when I did or where I am, because this doesn’t seem like a hospital anymore, more like a shopping mall, but there’s no one here and I don’t recognize any of the store names like Octavia’s and McNally’s Grill and they all seem closed, but I keep wandering further because I have nowhere else to be, and I don’t want to sit around and wait for something that might never happen, or at least everyone has been warning me that there’s no guarantee of recovery, but at the same time expects me to be by her side the whole time waiting for her to get better, like I don’t have a life or that I can just drop everything on a whim, but thankfully my boss was nice and told me, YYOU SHOULD TAKE OFF SOME TIME TO TAKE CARE OF HER, and I told him that work would help distract me, when in all honesty I hated against the idea of waking up from a twenty-year slumber and suddenly deciding that I should be a responsible husband, as if I was capable of doing so, but he told me not to come in for at least two weeks, and I knew there was no point in arguing with Bradley, because, for example, this one time, when I was new and Bear Stearns had just gone under, I argued for near total liquidation of our assets, and at that point Bradlye didn’t know me well and told me to CALM THE FUCK DOWN. THINGS COME AND GO BUT NEVER STAY THE SAME, and he was right about that in the end, but at the time I couldn’t let it go and he told me he was impressed I even had the balls to ask, so he promoted me up to some job with a fancy and useless title that oversaw a floor of day traders, and for the most part I did nothing but watch them screw around and make money on margins, so my life was easy and I was notably replaceable, but everyone loved me and I kept a high retention of employees, which I used to be proud of but it all seems so pointless now, save for the few guys who have called me and offered me condolences or Taco Bell gift cards, all of which I have declined because I don’t need charity, and now I’m on an escalator and watching the stores pass by, and I realize it’s dark and the mall is probably closed and I wonder how I got in or why no security has thrown me out, and I think for a second I may be a ghost but realize how stupid that sounds and try to make a plan to get out of here, knowing that I had taken a few too many turns just to backtrack, so I stop next to an ugly plastic tree that has been painted to resemble a real one and stare at a map which points me East, and I try to get it all in my head before heading back, but know I won’t remember it all, so I resign myself to the fact that I will probably get lost again and begin going, looking for landmarks, but I was so in my head that I don’t remember anything, like the signs that say PIERCINGS! BOGO, and I wonder suddenly if you have to pay to get your ears pierced by ear of if that means they’ll also pierce your nose or industrial or something for free, and for a second I consider getting my ears pierced, just to change things up, but I know I would never wear any earring and I would be stuck with ugly holes in my ears that I would have to explain to nosy people on the Metro for the rest of my life, as if I don’t have enough to explain to people, like this one time when and older lady asked if I was colorblind because my Converse were different colors and the man next to her suddenly found the nerve to ask why a middle aged man was wearing Converse with a button down and I told them both to fuck off, but I’ve never really shaken the fear that I am far too old to be the way that I am, I’m younger than I look, but not young, and I’m only be getting older, but I know some people won’t have the chance to get older, like Greta, who may just spend forever at the same age, with the same painted nails and the same haircut but underground in some box if she doesn’t pull through, and I can’t bear that thought so I look up and see that I am in front of a laser tag arcade, and for whatever reason, there’s no door closing it, just some short gate that barely reaches up to my waist, so I decide to hop it and walk past the empty booth into the dark purple mouth of the laser tag gym where it is totally dark, and I have to get out my flashlight on my phone to see anything, but I still can’t see much because the built-in flashlight is horrible, so I stumble around for a little bit, walking up ramps and over little bridges and between soft foam pylons that kids run through all day having the time of their lives which is apparently something money can by at that age, though I was always a miserable child who thought about things like the economics of scale and budgets before I had even reached the third grade, so I would always think about the $10 my parents paid more than the actual fun itself, which felt noble at the time but now feels selfish in some weird way, like I thought I was smarter than the other kids, which I may have been, but it doesn’t really matter when you’re seven years old, and I’m wandering and thinking through all this when I suddenly shine my light on some kid, maybe 20 years old crouched against a pylon staring at me with wide eyes and I shout and drop my phone and buckle over in fear and yell something like WHATAFUDUDE, and hear him just start babbling on about how he works here and got kicked out of the house on his 18th birthday and doesn’t have anywhere else to go and sleeps in the laser tag area and that he’ll leave and I shouldn’t press charges, and I’m interested in his story but I cut him off and tell him I’m not security and he asks what I’m doing here and I tell him that I have been wandering all day and don’t know where to go and he tells me he understands as he takes a scrunchie off of his wrist and puts up his slightly greasy shoulderblade-length hair, and I ask him how he doesn’t get caught and he tells me he doesn’t sleep much, which doesn’t answer my question at all, but I color in between the lines and it makes sense, so I ask him if he wants to sleep in the hospital room and he tells me he doesn’t, and I tell him that it’s good because I have no idea where it is and he tells me that I can sleep here for the night on one of the foam blocks and he will wake me up and get me out before I get caught, and I ask him about the janitors and security and he tells me that the security doesn’t go into the stores and the janitors only come on Friday, and he laughs when I ask him what day of the week it is and tells me it’s Tuesday and I tell him I trust him to make it clear that I don’t trust him at all and lay down a few yards away from where he is sitting and tell him about my wife and her hair and her job and how much she loves reading mystery books and drinking good coffee and petting dogs and how bad I feel about never letting her get one because I hated them, and that ever since that Metro Transit bus hit her on University Avenue I have been reaching out to shelters trying to adopt one because maybe that will be enough to make her pull through and start to love me again like she did when we met, but when I look over, he’s already asleep, all the tension out of his body and snoring softly, and I feel jealous of his freedom, the way he lives, and I wonder how much he worries, or if he even has to without having to pay rent or utilities, and maybe if he decided to he could just disappear into the Mississippi and never be seen again, which is kind of a blessing, to not have your life weaved into those of others, and I wonder what he dreams about, if there’s anyone else in them or if he only knows being alone and can’t think outside of that, and I’ve done enough thinking that I realize I will never sleep while he is still there, so I stand up, open my wallet, and take out $10, enough to repay my childhood laser tag debt, and slip it between his fingers before heading out for the exit, which feels intuitive to me, like all directions pointed towards it, like it was some sort of nexus, and I hop the gate and follow the dirty yellowing floor tiles all the way to the exit to the hospital, which is as far East as you can go, and quietly open the door as to not disturb the security guard, who is staring at a laptop with his headphones in, hands resting in the crevice between his shirt and his equipment vest, and it makes me wonder what the vest is for, if he gets a gun or a taser or just a walkie talkie, if he could beat me in a fight, but I don’t want to find that out, so I move quietly and slowly and like I hope, he doesn’t notice and I begin to make my way back into the hospital, passing room after room of silence and beeping, weaving between nurses who give me terse and tired smiles, reminding me to move along, reminding me to be with my wife, and when I count the hours I realize I have been awake for over a day, which I haven’t done since I was a Tommy, and it explains why I keep seeing things in the corner of my eyes, sometimes figures, just darting back and forth and wobbling like tops about to lose their balance, I take the elevator back up to floor seven where I know my wife is lying motionless and unalert, totally defenseless when I am not there, and that thought makes me move even faster through the halls, which up here are almost empty, and the lights are dampened for night and I make my way through the 720s and the 730s and all the way to 743, where I quietly open the door and look at Greta, studying the bruises under her eyes and the bandages around her head and the caste keeping her jaw in place, and I can only take that for so long before I sit down, feeling dizzy, and force myself to not cry, not now, because everyone cries in the hospital and it’s not worth anything, and when I’m just about to sleep, I see Greta bolt up and turn her head wildly until her eyes settle on me and I see an accusation in them that I am too stupid to understand, and my heart is suddenly and violently broken as I drift off to sleep.