The door gives when I come home. It’s been happening a lot that the lock sticks, becomes useless. I look around with a sense of detached anxiety that comes from somewhere outside of me. There is a man lounging on the couch. He’s almost asleep tall and lank and languid draped over the couch like he’s a fixture of my space invaded completely. In another dream he burrows a hole between our apartments. In another dream he appears on my balcony crawls through my window. In another dream I have a new apartment with a spare bedroom. I walk around a few times, unsure which room I want to claim for myself, notice the winding staircase that bridges my apartment to that above and below. There is a flimsy wire gate barring the way up and I can hear upstairs voices then I can see a man descend the stairs and casually step over the gate into my living room continuing his phone conversation.
I believe men when they tell me that my needs are not real. I sacrifice my sense of self and sense of place for them.
The anxiety of my unrealized unspoken self manifests in dreams as a physical space that continuously gets invaded in quotidian seeming ways. Doors that cannot lock, walls that soften and give to create alternate entryways, terraces and stairs that connect to stranger apartments.
Maybe this is about city high density anxiety but maybe it’s about being violated/invalidated/not worthy of claiming my own space.
There is a sense of dread in dreams but there is a sense of the ordinary too like I should expect this because it is how I interface with the world. My softness my willingness to cede to another’s will is an invitation for invasion and deterioration of self.
And then there is escape; discovering hidden rooms or secret wings of interiors I inhabit that signal stasis through wall-to-wall carpeting, flamingo pinks, turquoise tiles, glass block partitions. I take breaks in unlived decades. As if the nostalgia simulation of the familiar can reroute the lived familiar like the carpets in airports ground us to a moment between having been and becoming.
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Adie Margineanu is a writer living and working in Toronto. Her writing fixates on the murky boundaries of the physical body and the way liminality, interdependence, high-density living and the gaze can de/territorialize those boundaries. Her poems have been published in the Continuist: Ryerson's Creative Collective. Find her @cardibarthes.