A Name … A Name … What’s in a name? Apparently, everything. When I was someone around the age of 10-12 years old, a girl from down the street where I lived in Ocean City was kidnapped, raped, and murdered. Big bruhaha back in the day too, I even made it on the news (I remembering being nervous as fuck about it too, especially when the cops questioned me thinking I had something to do with it.) There are a few things I remember about that time in my life. It was summer, the family had just moved their not that long ago and I was making fast friends with the kids, there were three of them, an older sister, Onia (I think that was her name), the middle sister (the one this all happened too) and a younger boy. The middle girl and younger boy, I can’t remember their names, not for the life of me.
For the first decade after that event, I completely blocked it out of my life, I think I spoke about it once to my Mom, but that was it (and she wasn’t much help to what ever questions I had posed to her.) After the first decade and ever since then, I’ve had some reoccurring and very vague dreams about that ordeal, the most resent one has me very disturbed, I can’t stop thinking about it, or her name.
The dream is in two parts. But before I get into that, I should explain. I have rarely remembered my dreams, and when I do, they are shocking, frightening, most times horrific that even Hollywood can’t achieve. Thankfully, 99.9% of the time, I forget them, before I wake up or just after waking up. Rarely have I woken up with a start from a dream, bathed in sweat, except when I dream about her. It’s like being in Hollywood, almost. The dream starts out in third-person, with me looking down at myself. I am asleep on my back, my right arm is at my side, my hand on my stomach, I am cover3d by a sheet and I am shirtless (and still unfortunately fate as all fuck.) My left arm is extended across the bed and a woman is asleep, face down, her left hand is on my arm, her right dangling off the bed. She’s also covered by the same sheet, from the waste down (it’s safe to assume we’re both naked at this point, I know I did.) I realize she is the absolute most beautiful woman I have ever seen, I also feel like I know her well, for years, yet she was absent and we were just reunited. As soon as I’ve absorbed all of this, people are busting though my door, the shock of this noise zaps me back into my sleeping body and I sit up asking what the hell is going on. Upon sitting up, I notice a bunch of shit in very quick secession, two of the guys are dressed in blue wool suites, tan trench coats, grey fedora’s and they are both carrying snub-nose .38 Special handguns, they are followed by 4 uniformed cops, all with their guns drawn, they are all revolvers, not one of them was a semi-automatic, this struck me as odd. The next thing I know, one of them (a big fella) is strong-arming me out of bed and telling me I am under arrest for the murder of *someone*. I can’t remember who, but I know it was the woman lying asleep … erm, dead in my bed next to me they were talking about. The last thing I remember is being sat down on a wooden chair, it was cold against my naked ass, I pinched myself from a crack in the seat, I’m still handcuffed and there is a bright light about 6 inches above my head and the two cops are grilling me hard about who she is and why I killed her, I notice that one of them (the big guy who roughed me up and pulled me out of bed) lights up on a cigarette, I can’t see his face, but I can see the smoke collect around the brim of his fedora. Then I woke up (in a cold sweat and when a start, I was seriously out of breath like I had just run a marathon.)
Obviously, the reason why I have included this dream in this post is because I think the dead girl in my dream was her, finally manifesting itself in some way. But that’s not the truly significant part. The reason I have obsessed over this for a full 2/3 of my life is because I know, deep down in my heart, that she was my first crush and I never had the chance to tell her. What makes it even more painful, after it all happened and just before her family moved away, her older sister told me that she also had a crush on me. I was floored by this, I didn’t know what to do with it. But I have always remembered that this was the beginning of a very profound and utterly deep sadness that welled up in me and I’ve never been able to shake it. Not even now, now, it’s just more profound and as deep as ever, black as night and it just echos my sadness back at me, but amplified.
The house is still their, the house I lived in is gone, but hers is still their, Google Maps even shows me the stepping stones I saw her father placed from the front walkway to the side door. But I can’t remember her name (or her face for that matter), but I can remember almost every other detail about her and the short time I knew her.
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