Oct 182012
 

This morning, as soon as I woke up, I got in one of my bi-polar cleaning snits. Every room of this house was making me freak out and kick things, and then I called Henry and took it out on him too. When I came home from taking Chooch to school, I sat down and put on Gary Numan’s Exile album in an effort to calm myself down. And then all the memories came flooding back.

It was October of 1999. I desperately needed to find a new place to live after getting (wrongfully) evicted from my current apartment. (That’s a whole different story.) My dad had found this great duplex in Brookline and I was waiting impatiently for the landlord to call me back after I filled out the application. Renting this house was all I could think about; back then, it was a great space—HUGE for one person. Granted, this was before a boyfriend, cats and a kid would shit all over its value. (In some cases, literally.)

During this time, I was going through a heavy Gary Numan phase. Not so much Tubeway Army-era, but his more current, sludge-y Goth work. One night, in my apartment, I had fallen asleep on the couch* listening to his Exile (Extended) album on repeat and had one of the most vivid nightmares of my life, of which I still have flashbacks even to this day.

(*When I lived in that apartment, I slept on the couch every night because some old bitch always had her TV blaring 24:7 on the other side of my bedroom wall and no matter where I moved my bed, I could hear it and it was slowly making me want to take a pickaxe to her face. I even complained to the landlady about this, but that bitch was in bed with all the other old ass people living in that complex, which led to my eventual eviction.)

In the dream, I was rollerskating down highways at night, frantically trying to get to the house in Brookline. I was totally out of control, skating over medians and down cobblestone hills, unable to stop. But finally, I made it to the street. In the dream, the house had an enclosed front porch (in real life, my house does not have a front porch); I let myself in and had to squeeze my way around bikes, toys, stacked furniture, debris in various stages of decomposition. Clearly, someone was still someone living there.

Squatting down in a corner was a little girl with black hair, dressed in a nightgown. She said, “You can’t go in there, Erin.”

I asked her how she knew my name.

“Marcy told me,” she said in a monotone, and then her eyes flashed red and I woke up totally freaked the fuck out. (Marcy is my evil cat, if you didn’t already know.)

Thirteen years later and I can’t wait to get the fuck out of the house I had to rent. Thirteen years is way too long to have been renting the same place.  In my dream, I was told I couldn’t go in there, and now I feel like I can’t get out. I’m so unhappy here.

  One Response to “Full Circle: Gary Numan’s Absolution”

  1. I’m so sorry you are unhappy with your house. Thirteen years IS a really long time to be in the same place, especially if you are not happy with it. :(

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