nachtmares

Long long ago, when I was a little girl, I had a recurring nightmare about the Tall Lady.

The Tall Lady was so incredibly tall that she could stand in our foyer (typical early eighties split-level ranch) and reach the chandelier. The Tall Lady was so thin that she could slip through the crack between the door and the door frame, when the door was closed. She could hide behind the banister rungs and the houseplants and she had the ability to make the stairs disappear while I was trying to run up them to get away from her. I feel like I was always running up and down the stairs to try to get away from her. She was dressed in impossible black dresses that I could never really figure out. I remember thinking she could put me in a pocket and hide me so no one could find me. She had black hair and black eyes that were sometimes a little bit red, sometimes a little bit blue.

She chased after me because she wanted to take me away from my mother.

I think of the Tall Lady from time to time, maybe once a week or so. Sometimes if I'm out late I see her in an alleyway and I can almost laugh because I'm 32 years old and haunted by a nightmare that I stopped having a quarter century ago. I swear she's been in the subway, just outside my speeding train, looking in at me to make sure I don't feel too safe. I see her standing at the top of my stairs every once in awhile, but I know now that she won't take any of the steps away from me as I try to go up to tend to my screaming child in the middle of the night.

I'm sure she doesn't want him the way she wanted me, but I can't be confident that Jake doesn't know that. I don't know what happens in his head that makes him cry in his sleep*.

I was sitting alone, late the other night, eating something that had been meant as an evening snack for Jake but was discarded on the window sill (what? like you don't eat your kid's scraps?) when I saw an ad for Coraline, the new Harry Selnick movie.

There she was.

I choked on whatever it was I was eating and lost my breath at the same time. She is someone else's nightmare too. Jesus. Someone made a movie about that damn bitch.

So, do I see this movie and just get over it or do I run and hide and bring it up in therapy? Should I read the book and hope it doesn't have pictures? Should I read a synopsis of the story in hopes that maybe this Tall Lady is a Good Tall Lady and maybe this is all for naught? Is it normal for a growedass woman to still be afraid of something that never existed in the first place? I'm getting jumpy in the dark lately. I'm having a hard time sleeping. I don't trust my eyes. I don't trust the noises that I can only hope are caused by the cat jumping around in another room. I can't stop thinking about the Tall Lady and the fact that she is in a movie and I shut my eyes every time the trailer comes on because I can't bear to see her outside of my brain.

This is so ridiculous.

*This morning at 4am Jake asked me if he could take off his head. If you know me, you know that my greatest fear is a severed head. I don't even like to see the words. I told him "no", of course. He asked "why? because of the spiders?".
"What spiders?"
"the spiders that crawl around inside my head. you don't want them to get out?"

bewwwwellchk.