“If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?”
-Stephen CraneEverything is changing. The world outside my window is at war, and there are monsters everywhere. They are standing right next to me on the subway. They are seated at the tables at my work. They are living right next door as my neighbors, and I am just a human person trying to protect myself and my mother from the brutal violence of the reality we were dropped into. For years, my psyche survived by looking at the horror and demanding a happyending. I was Ofelia. When the environment became too crushing to bear, I dropped to my knees, drew a chalk door on the stone walls of my prison, and stepped through into a labyrinth of my own making. I thought the fantasy was a shelter. I didn’t realize it was a flood. Neptune is not a gentle planet of soft-focus dreams; it is the Great Dissolver. It is the vast, terrifying ocean of the psyche that seeks to erase every boundary, pull down every wall, and drown the individual identity back into the infinite void. This door was not my ow making but rather my inheritance. My mother was born still completely enclosed in her amniotic sac—shrouded in the watery caul of a natural seer. She is the literal birth and death of many. She is a woman who lives with one foot permanently anchored in the unseen world, carrying prophetic dreams that seeped directly into my own bloodline. She gave me this power, too, but I cannot control it. I still carry a childish rage against her for dreaming rows of lottery numbers and refusing to play them, refusing to use her sight to buy our way out of the struggle. But the sight is never steady, and it is never clean. My dreams only come when the moon is wet and heavy in the watery signs of the zodiac. They do not arrive as casual thoughts; they hit me like a physical exhaustion upon waking. Dreaming, for me, is the exhausting labor of visiting another world, a violent displacement where I am forced to live entirely different lives in the span of a single night. I remember fragments—the texture of the air, the weight of the messages—but most of it dissolves into ash by morning. I am done hiding behind the narrative of a tragic girl in a dizzying maze to justify my own dissociation.I used to use my dreams and my sensitivity as a beautiful excuse to slip away from the physical world, pretending that because the monsters were real, I was allowed to stay asleep. But Ofelia’s tragedy wasn't that she believed in fairies; it was that the labyrinth eventually demanded her life to prove her royalty. The fantasy didn't save her physical body from the captain's bullet. My only option is the terrifying choice to wake up. I am taking the watery sight inherited from my mother’s amniotic sac and I am bringing it into the light of day. I do not need the chalk door anymore. The psychic fever dreams and the visitations to other lives are no longer an escape hatch out of my reality. They are my vision. I am standing on the subway, looking directly at the monsters, and choosing to hold my own space. The real magic isn't disappearing into this metaphorical abyss. Rather it is the sovereign courage to look at a monstrous world with open eyes, carry the weight of the unseen, and still refuse to break.