My Fucking Nightmare

In the event of a loss, or hearing devastating news, a person usually goes through what is called the five stages of grief. First will come denial, where the world just doesn’t seem the way you remember it being. Everything is a lie. As far as one is concerned, reality just doesn’t exist anymore. Denial slowly slips into its darker form, anger, which takes its hold and sucks all other emotions away. There is nothing but red. The world is dark, unfair, and unjust. A simple, human reaction to a not-so-simple problem.
Anger will eventually subside and along will come the questionable task of bargaining. Take my life instead. I’ll do anything to keep everything the way it was. So on, so forth, until there’s nothing left to wish for. All hope pretty well seems lost. Slip into depression, into blackness, and realize that there is no coming out of this unscathed. The damage has been done. And yet, hope finds its way back. As does peace. Everything falls into place. Whatever news or life-altering circumstance comes to be, there’s always a way to deal with it.
However, not everyone comes out of these five stages alive.
I dealt a harsh blow on my relationship. I’ve come to those terms. I’ve accepted it and moved on. And I thought Brian had moved on as well, but there was just something about him that never clicked the way it did before. My once-invincible husband, lost in the rain. Cast out to sea in an overtaking wave of disputing emotions. I had no way to help him.
The shame alone almost killed me. I made a grave mistake, a mistake I hadn’t realized until after the birth of my daughter, my first-born. And unbelievably, without memory of what had happened and how I’d been impregnated by the man I wasn’t supposed to marry, I was in complete denial. The paperwork of the blood tests, the timeline, the stories Matt told me…none of it amounted to the truth that I’d done something so wrong and abhorrent to Brian. It couldn’t. I could absolutely not believe it.
So I pushed him away. In fact, I pushed them all away. Matt, my daughter whom was in his custody, Brian, the rest of them. Even my brother who had flown back to Los Angeles in this crisis…I pushed them away and locked myself out of my own life. Anger didn’t even come close to what I felt. There was a certain degree of betrayal thrown in the mix somewhere, to be honest. What Matt had done and what I’d allowed him to do went against every fibre of my own morality.
And Brian. Every time I looked at him I saw the disappointment, the hurting. Even before all this truth came out, I saw the disappointment in his eyes. The realization that I’d been sexually assaulted, broken, beaten. Maimed. I was flawed in his eyes, with or without Matt’s touch across my body. Before all this came out into the open, Brian never looked at me the same. Our wedding day might have been the only day where the painful reminder was forgotten. A time long gone, yes, but forever etched into me in scars across my skin. Bruised and broken bones forever tender.
I longed for loving eyes. Eyes that only one man had ever given me, regardless of what I’d gone through. Regardless of the scars on both my body and soul. I longed for his touch and kiss. Yet, here I was in the office of a marriage counsellor with my husband who wouldn’t dare touch me, let alone share a couch cushion with me as he always used to.
I’ll just say this: my faith in the head-peepers going into the session was a lot higher than when I came out. Apparently this guy we were seeing was the best in California. He’d seen everything, the cream of the crop. Divorcees wanting to get back together, serial philanderers, polyamorous relationships, you name it. Our problems were only scratching the surface.
Call this the bargaining part of grief, but I already knew that there was no way this could be salvaged. And coming here was my idea to begin with. So I sat in silence, listening to Brian droning on about how jaded he felt having to deal with “all this bullshit”, as he put it. I patiently waited my turn, noting just how much Brian had left out.
While the counsellor scribbled down his notes the room was silent. I stared at the floor. There was nothing Brian could have said that would hurt me anymore than I was already, so that was a relief. I was a published writer. I mean, without experience in dabbling in fiction, even I could pinpoint every single emotion in his voice, on his face. Without him expressing those feelings. He was an open book and I had control over every page.
He dropped the pen and stared up at me, big eyes bulging through thick glasses. The fluorescent light lit up his bald spot on the centre of his head. He was the typical marriage counsellor and I was almost too distracted to think about what I was going to say. I had to choke back my laughter. “Okay, Melissa. Let’s uh, start where I had Brian start off. He mentioned his band having troubles with one member’s addiction problems following a painful divorce proceeding. And this affected you on a more personal level. Could you tell me why?”
“Brian explained it pretty exclusively, Dr. Harper. He married my long-term roommate, they got pregnant, she lost the baby, and then they went on tour. She couldn’t handle being alone so she found someone else. He found out the hard way. Which, ultimately, drove him to binge drinking. I actually can’t stress enough just how messed up he actually got.”
Dr. Harper nodded, but didn’t write anything down. “Right. And this affected you on what basis? Romantically? Emotionally?”
“Well, considering my mother is a hard drug user and alcoholic, I’d say it hit pretty close to home. So yes, emotionally. That and none of the other members of the band really had his back. Out of maybe twenty occasions that we all visited him, to make sure he was okay, I’d say at least ten were personal visits by me, or it was my original idea. I practically had to drag Brian to see him.”
His gaze became scrutinizing, locked on Brian. “How would you agree with Melissa here?”
Brian sighed. “It’s true. We didn’t want anything to do with him. He wanted us to leave him alone.”
“Well, leaving him alone would have fucking killed him, Brian.” I sneered. “We found him one afternoon on the bathroom floor. Choked on his own vomit, stopped breathing. Heart stopped beating on the way to the hospital. They revived him once in the ambulance and again in the ER. We all went to check him in and give all his information. I was the only one who stayed.”
Dr. Harper now began writing. “Did you feel responsible for him as a reason to stay? Do you believe that it was any fault of any of you to make you want to leave? Were you ashamed?”
Brian tried to speak but I cut him off. “I felt like we weren’t there enough for him to begin with. We let him make bad choices. Drowning his sorrows in liquor was definitely one of them. And I mean, no one knew if he was using any drugs or anything. So when we got to the hospital they admitted him, ran a bunch of tests. We thought he’d be in a coma for a while, and I’d already seen that happen once before. With my dad and all.”
“So you did take responsibility.”
“Yes.” I snapped. “Someone had to.”
Brian shot to the edge of the cushion on the couch across the room and shot an index finger toward me. “Matt made his own fucking choices, Melissa. He was a grown ass man with the ability to decide whether he’d drink himself stupid or not. You always do this. You always make it personal. Wouldn’t you think for one second that if we weren’t his friends for almost ten years or more that we wouldn’t have known how he’d react to something like this? It wasn’t the first time he had his heart ripped out. Or the first time he damn near drank himself to death.”
“It’s classified as reckless or suicidal behaviour, Brian. That’s what the doctor told me in the hospital after you all left. He was trying to drink himself to death. When he woke up he even told us that it hurt more than the first time around. He was tired of being hurt. Tired of coming last.”
Brian scoffed and fell back into his cushion. “Time for him to grow the fuck up then.”
“Okay, we’ll come back to this after. So it was a short while after this incident that you two got engaged, correct? Let’s discuss that.”
I sighed. This was gonna be fun. “Brian had it all planned out. Like, to a tee. He’d be on stage. They’d have me get up with them and he’d propose in front of the whole arena. Like, tens of thousands of people in this place and he would do his thing. And everyone else had their part to play too.”
“Were you happy? Scared? Upset?”
I shook my head vehemently. “I was completely unaware that they’d do it. And it was one of the most magical nights I’d ever had. The love was there, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Mm.” He muttered, scribbling more down in his notebook. “And following the engagement, tell me about that.”
“I went to Vegas and he went to Huntington Beach to visit his family.” I shot him a look across the room that screamed apology. “Brian Sr. wanted to take him on a father-son bachelor party. Beers, fishing, talks about marriage and the horrors of it, I’d assume. I was going to visit a medium.”
Dr. Harper paused and set his pen down. “Now this is the part that Brian stressed that played a large role in the falling out of your relationship. I may need Brian to revise his statement previously given. Now, currently my understanding is that you, Melissa, had a very interesting relationship with Matt following his hospitalization. Care to elaborate?”
“Yes. When Matt was hospitalized he came very close to death. And while they weren’t the words of the medium I saw in Vegas, I did some research on the phenomenon that happened to us and I guess it’s called the Kiss of Death, or the Shadow Kiss. Which at the time made no sense, because one morning I woke up after having this really ridiculously vivid dream where I was watching Matt in his house without actually being there. A week later I could hear him thinking and talking out loud. Another week or two later we were communicating, for lack of a better word, through conscious thought. I went to a couple doctors who all thought I was fucking crazy. The whole idea of it is…mind numbing. Almost seemed fictitious. But there were things I knew by listening to him thinking that I shouldn’t ever have known.”
“And yet you couldn’t ‘see him’ coming to Vegas.” Brian jeered. “Seems just a little bit too good to be true.”
“Thank you for your input, Brian, but if I wanted your opinion, I’d have asked for it. No, I knew he was talking and thinking about Vegas. And by the time I recognized his focus on the idea, I was so drunk that I had no idea how to even focus on it. So yeah, he probably was on his way and focussing on trying to tell me. Harriet and I had already drank three bottles of wine between us, so excuse me for not remembering everything to the perfect detail.”
He rolled his eyes. “It was a crock of shit excuse, Melissa. How the fuck could you have proven that even happened? Kiss of Death, fuck you read too much bullshit. Writers are so naïve, reading everything they can get their hands on. Take something with a grain of salt for once, for fuck sakes.”
“There’s things I know about him that you definitely wouldn’t. And vice versa. No, there is no evidence to support this happening. It’s like a supernatural investigation. You have to experience firsthand what’s happening, or you miss the point entirely. Look, back to what I was saying. Matt showed up at my door. I didn’t disclose with him what hotel I was staying at, let alone what room. I didn’t even tell him I was going to Vegas. So my point is that, yes. I was surprised to see him. And for the most part, really annoyed.”
“And what was the point of even going to Las Vegas? Just to see this medium?”
I cleared my throat and took a deep breath. “That was the main reason, yes. I wanted to get in touch with my old roommate. Matt’s ex-wife, Harriet, one of my closest girlfriends. I wanted away from my life for a weekend. Figure out what the hell was going on in my head.” I exhaled and inhaled sharply. I was anxious and out of breath. “Harriet is currently seeing someone in a television show called Ghost Adventures. A while ago I covered a story on one of their investigations in the Riviera hotel. The crew leader was the guy who set me up with the medium. Said she was one of the best. And she was.”
“And Matt went with you.”
“Yes. She told us that we have a soul bond. Not necessarily soul mates, but bonded through the Shadow Kiss. An energy that forged our souls together in the hospital that day Matt almost died. I am a sceptic so all this was just…way too much for me to believe at that point, but there were clues. There was evidence. And after we left, the link just…stopped. Like it shut down. I couldn’t hear him. He couldn’t hear me. I was cured of whatever weird shit that was all about. It was relieving.”
Dr. Harper’s gaze wouldn’t leave mine. “I do believe there are forces in this world that go beyond what our minds can comprehend. I do, I believe in the spiritual stuff. Soulmates. All that astrology stuff. It’s what makes me so good at this. I feel on a specific level, on a tier, that you and Brian are in every way compatible. I believe you two are a perfect match. Before now you did not fight. There were no conflicts, no reason for me to believe that anything was wrong.”
“Yeah, and after that whole Vegas thing, everything started to go wrong. Literally fucking everything. Melissa got food poisoning from some bad food down there. Fell in the bathroom and broke some ribs. Then we found out she was pregnant and I had to go on tour again. It was a couple months only, but in that time it really hit the fan.”
I cleared my throat, watching Dr. Harper pick his pen back up. “Yes, this is the part where Melissa was attacked. Please, I’d like to know more about that. It is a sensitive topic, yes, so please. Only give what you can. I’m not expecting to know everything.”
“No, no. It’s fine. It started out as a group of kids scoping out some houses in the neighbourhood. It went on for days. None of them were caught or arrested. Just a group of little shits causing trouble. And then it started getting worse. They broke into a few houses, ours included.” I cleared my throat again. My hands started to tremble and I felt sick. “It turned out that these kids were trying to get on with their record label, but their demos weren’t good enough to work with. They were rejected. And I guess Zack and Brian had a lot to do with it, because they targeted our houses out of them all once they found out where we lived. They waited ‘til the tour started and broke in, stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise, clothing, band apparel. I started staying at Matt’s since it was the other side of town, and he has a really big dog…” My face turned red as it all came flooding back.
I sensed Brian’s apprehensiveness wore off. He got up and came over to my couch to try and calm me down, but I just wasn’t having it. I was angrier than anything else and I didn’t need comfort. I needed closure. “They followed me to Matt’s. That’s the only explanation I have. They didn’t show up there before that night… I have no idea what time it happened. Just after two, I guess. They showed up in a blacked-out van. Wearing Brian’s clothes that they stole. They were trying to frame him.”
“It wasn’t just my clothes, either. They did break into Zack and Jimmy’s places. I don’t think we told you, but yeah. It happened.” Brian sighed. I felt sicker. “Keep going, you can do it.”
I took another deep breath and continued. “I hid in the garage. Bishop, the dog, attacked and bit one of them but he was kicked or something and hurt pretty bad. Stabbed, maybe. Matt never said. And they found me and just…went nuts. That’s all. They did what they wanted and it was maybe four or five months later that I started feeling normal again.”
“And it’s my understanding that they were arrested and sentenced quite heftily.”
Brian and I nodded. “It just doesn’t end there. In fact, I think that’s where we started getting worse. I think the best day we had since before that happened was the day of the wedding. And then the birth of our daughter.” Shit. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought that up yet.
“No, you mean your daughter.” Brian went right back to his annoyed, pissed off self. “Because Las Vegas happened.”
“Brian, your resentment here is allowed, but you’re going to need to simmer down and let us pace ourselves through it. We’re a long ways away from getting to the bottom of all this, and your effort in doing so will speed it up. Melissa, tell me how you felt following this awful incident.”
I closed my eyes and clenched my fists. “Numb. So numb at first. I couldn’t believe it happened. I mean, they might as well have shot and killed me because after that, I just wasn’t the same. None of us were. There was a lot of tension and paranoia. I didn’t leave the house for a while. I was constantly looking over my shoulder. I screened a lot of calls. And I didn’t eat.”
“Oh. Please elaborate on the not eating.”
Okay, this might be unnecessary…but I wasn’t the doctor. So whatever. “I was this empty shell of a person. I went from confident and fearless and generally happy with my life to this miserable vessel. I was depressed. And combining all those emotions with pregnancy, I mean…the intensity was probably tripled. It was crippling. We weren’t intimate. We didn’t communicate. He was busy enough with the new album and being in the studio all the time. I was alone and I needed to be. That was the only way. Because whenever Brian was around, I felt pressured to be that exact person he was getting married to.”
Brian snapped again, raising his voice to a level I hadn’t heard before. “What the hell are you talking about? Just because you were busy being a miserable bitch, it doesn’t mean that I had everything to fucking do with any of that. You were brutally attacked. Almost murdered in Matt’s garage. I had enough problems dealing with the fact that I wasn’t here when I should have been. I wasn’t protecting you. I put you on the line and put my career first. How do you think that made me feel? And the whole lack of intimacy part isn’t my fault either. You needed to abstain. I wasn’t expecting you to climb onto my dick right after you were fucking raped, Melissa. Don’t even start with me.”
“Yes, because me being raped has everything to do with you. Maybe if you guys hadn’t told those little punks that they weren’t good enough that they wouldn’t have come around preying on your women! It wasn’t just me they had their eyes on, Brian. Gina was another target. Jamie would have been too except she went to see her parents while you were all gone. We’ve been over this a hundred times. Oh, and while we’re still talking about it, maybe you shouldn’t take things so personal, either. Playing the goddamn victim, oh woe is Brian. I wasn’t here to save my woman and she was raped and tainted by some little punk bitch from down the road. Woe is Brian, I’m a victim. Fucking cry me a river.”
“I’d have taken a bullet for you.”
“Yeah, and I already took one for you.” Brian shut up, got off his couch, and left the office. I was about to chase after him, but Dr. Harper told me to sit. He needed me to finish venting and ranting. Called it cathartic, called it healthy. Insulting the person you swore to love until the end probably wasn’t healthy, but alright.
About fifteen minutes later, Brian came back in. Eyes red from crying. He didn’t bother looking at me. “Doc, we gonna survive this or are we just wasting our time?”
“Sounds like you already made your mind up.” I spat. “Vows can just get canceled like that, huh?”
“Well, you know, it wasn’t me that fucked someone else and got pregnant.”
“Yeah because I totally was aware that it even happened. You think I would have married you if I knew that I slept with Matt? Must be nice being up on that high fucking horse. I’m not as evil as you think I am.”
Dr. Harper snapped his fingers and grabbed both our attentions. “Listen, we’ve made a ton of progress today. But I think I’m going to call it a day.”
“No, see, we’re paying you top dollar to help us get to the bottom of this. Clear your schedule, doc. We’re not leaving until a decision is made.” As much as I didn’t want to be in this little cubicle, I agreed with Brian.
Harper paged his assistant at the desk outside his door and told her to cancel all his other appointments. There was a sort of excitement in his voice. “Very well. Where were we? Right, Melissa. So you really don’t remember anything about that night in Las Vegas? This mysterious night where you conceived your child with Matt.”
“No, I remember most of it now. I choose to ignore most of the flashbacks. But at the day of my wedding and Audrey’s birthday, no. I was not aware of it.”
Brian shuffled to make himself comfortable. “And when did you remember, Liss? How much time went by between the time that it finally came back to you and when I found out?”
“We both found out the same day. I wouldn’t have remembered if Matt hadn’t said anything. So he basically told us both.” I knew it wasn’t wholly true, but I needed to make Brian believe. I needed him to believe. Yes, there was some truth. Matt did tell me what happened. I had dreams about it happening days before I realized, but again with that whole denial thing… Powerful stuff, really.
He closed his eyes, releasing a long exhale. I tried reading his emotions. There was so much pain, betrayal. The usual spiel. Everything Matt felt when Harriet left him for Aaron. I mean, call me cruel, but it was time Brian felt some of the things Matt did. We’d been living on cloud nine for so long. It was bound to come a time where we both fell from it. Paradise doesn’t exactly exist forever.
After being silent for several moments, Brian finally looked over at me. “So you don’t love Matt. You married me because you love me. And if he didn’t tell us that he had reason to believe Audrey was his…we wouldn’t have ever known. You can live with that?”
“I suppose I can. Can you?”
“I…I don’t know. Probably. I just need some time. A couple drinks. A couple smokes. I need to reset.”
Harper knew to stay silent. He just watched us intently. “But you did have a baby in there, Brian. You did father a child. I know it didn’t make it to term…listen, I had an idea.”
Brian’s attention towards me grew stronger. I watched as he relaxed. “Matt’s not interested in having a relationship with me. And it killed him to lose his child and his wife at almost the same time. He went away after Harriet miscarried…came back to her banging some other guy. His world shattered from beneath him. I think, if the kid is his, let him keep her. You know, like I was a surrogate mother. Does that make sense?”
“You mean, we could try again for another baby?”
“Yes. And we could really be a family. Hell, we could even renew our vows. If that’s what it takes to convince you that you and I are still married.”
He pulled back into his spot and stared at the ceiling. “Doc, five minutes ago we were about to come to blows. Is this…normal?”
The doctor laughed. “Yes. You both came to a middle point. I suppose I’m glad we didn’t call it a day. Melissa, Brian, welcome back to your marriage.”
I suppose this was what acceptance felt like. Not quite real, but survivable.

Notes