Movin' Out

and the terrors of sweating.

It happened quickly. I was at work when I got a text from my girlfriend around 10 am, she asks me if I’d be open to the idea of moving into a 5-acre property in the desert. I raise my eyebrows then respond, “You need to give me more info than that A.” She tells me her boss knows someone who urgently needs a long-term house sitter and she needs an answer soon. No rent, don’t have to pay utilities, out in the open desert. 3 days later, I write this from a cabin window looking out into the Mojave.

Although I’ve never left the home nest before and am anxious, I see plenty of “Keep the Desert Weird” signs and white women wearing leather jackets with fringe as I drive around town so I think I’m in my type of town. I’ve always felt like an outsider in my own home and throughout my childhood I was often the sibling that made everyone else uncomfortable in the family. I was short, very pale compared to my family, plus I didn’t speak Spanish which is a must, I threw temper tantrums, I broke the Xbox. In other words I was the bleached-white black sheep of my 1st generation Mexican-American family and I think I found my new home.

The last memory I have of “home” now is grabbing the last of my art supplies from my desk while my uncle steam cleans my old mattress (God bless my uncle.) There are light-yellow stains all over it, becoming darker like a topographic map where my sweat or other fluid found it’s deepest canyon to nest in. I can read this map. I mostly see random blotches but where I lay to sleep every night had a noticeable outline of a figure’s body, my body.. I flash back in time to when I would wake up from night terrors

gasping for air and throwing the sheets off me in the same
stroke, i wake i flail i sit up to find myself in a 
waking hell my clothes are drenched and cold
How am i sweating and cold? Do i get naked and go outside
agian? Take another shower? If i go to back to sleep in my wet 
bed will this come back another hour?

As a child I had nightmares of being chased by men, killed even, decapitated. But these new terrors were different; I thought for a year that my body was trying to tell me to die. Each month had a different scene that would haunt me at night. At times I would wake up sitting up and screaming, sometimes I would cry myself to sleep, sometimes I would sleep outside my sibling’s door so I didn’t feel alone. Those nights lasted almost every night for 2 years.

Now I am 27 years old and going into exile via Mojave. I am standing above my bed in my room watching all the footprints of my nervous sex and fearful nights be steam-washed away. (God bless my uncle.) Suddenly I turn to my Tio Jose and utter the words, “I used to have dreams everynight that my dad would kill me.”

“what?” is all he can say.

We hear the front door to the home open and look at each other.

“Hello?” it’s Dad.