Test Anxiety

I just rediscovered a piece I wrote for one of my English classes last semester. It made me laugh out loud, so I'm thinking of posting it here. The prompt was to recount a vivid dream.
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As if anxiety were analogous to standing in a photography darkroom, my dreams develop sharper in periods of distress. I constantly dream during the year—but my recollection of dreams becomes more crisp and vivid when I am faced with crushing pressure in my daylight reality. As such, there are two dreams of this nature that I can recall with intense detail, but first—a staging of our scene:

Sophomore Year, Fall 2010

The first year of my college career at Duke was marked with interminable hair loss due to stress and general unhappiness with the state of my academic affairs. “Below Average” would be the title of this sorry chapter, if I ever choose to write about the time when I placed all of my self-worth on my exam results.

Things were starting to look up in my sophomore year. I had taken a difficult class over the summer and done relatively well. I felt as if I were finally acclimating to Duke and had stopped wondering how I would have fared differently if I had attended a California state university instead. My father had originally wanted me to attend UC Berkeley—it had been his dream school and, with in-state tuition, seemed to him to be a much more cost-effective deal. I refused to stay in California, and so we butt heads for weeks until my mother finally persuaded him to relent. Yet the cost of private school tuition loomed over my head all through the first year, the blade of the guillotine threatening to off my head if I failed to make good use of my parents’ money. I was finally awarded some financial aid in my sophomore year, and so my father’s complaints began to diminish. The academic pressure, however, never completely went away.

In the fall of 2010, I entered Finals Week sitting on the fence between two letter grades for nearly all of my classes. By day, I lived the life of a hermit—confined to my room and going for days without seeing the light of the sun. In contrast, my nights were much more turbulent and theatrical. By night, I lived out my worst nightmares.

The Dead Dog 

Besides the obligatory answer of seeing family and friends, there are two things I look forward to the most when I return home for the holidays: stuffing my face with food and playing with my dog Matisse.

I returned home after final exams, picked up from the airport by my mother. I entered the house through the garage door, and instead of being greeted at the door by a hyperactive white Maltese, I found instead a scrappy black-and-white puppy barely taller than a soda can. Who is this dog? And where the heck is Matisse? Before I could ask, my mother directed me into the kitchen where the scent of home-cooked Chinese braised pork was already making my mouth water.

After my family and I ate dinner in the kitchen, my father insisted on watching one of the DVDs from his expansive collection in the downstairs closet—a tradition in the household, where we do our best to indulge in my father’s obsessive collections. Past childhood memories include driving to every Hallmark within a fifteen-mile radius the day after Christmas for the sake of my father’s Beanie Baby collection, or eating McDonald’s for a week straight for the sake of my father’s Happy Meal toy collection. But my father’s compulsive collecting habits is a story for a different day.

We sat in the living room watching some action film I can’t quite remember the name of. I was too distracted by the unfamiliar puppy, which tumbled around under the coffee table a few times before crawling out to take a nap in its carrier by the kitchen entrance.

 “So… where is Matisse?” I finally asked, keeping my tone as natural as if I were asking about the weather.

My father and brother were too engrossed in the film to answer, so it was my mother who spoke.

“Oh, Matisse?” she replied nonchalantly. “He died a few weeks ago. But isn’t Picasso such a cutie?”

When I awoke moments later, tears were streaming down my face and I was about ready to clock someone.

The Skeletal Family

For some reason, my parents could not pick me up from the airport. Instead, I took a taxi that dropped me off in front of the peach-colored two-story house I have called home for the last sixteen years of my life.

When I walked through the front door and caught sight of my family, I did a double-take. My mother, father, brother—all of them were utterly emaciated, with sunken jaws and vacant eyes. They looked like skeletons with skin stretched taut over the bones. I froze at the door, afraid to touch them.

 “Wh-what happened to you guys?” I managed to sputter out.

“Oh, what are you talking about?” my mother said cheerily, her bony jaw sliding up and down like a nutcracker’s. “Why don’t you come inside—there’s lunch on the stove already!”

“No, I mean—what’s wrong with you guys? You all look like skeletons…”

“What are you talking about?” my teenaged brother said, indignant. “We’ve always been this skinny. Come on—let’s go eat lunch.”

I couldn’t stomach the thought of eating in the company of these people, not when I could already see the lines of their bones jutting from beneath their tan, papery skin. I excused myself quickly, saying I would check the mail outside, and bolted from the house. When I approached the white mailbox at the front corner of the driveway, I saw my next-door neighbor standing on the adjacent lawn and waved.

“Hello, Sophelia! Back from school already?” he asked. To my relief, my neighbor looked just as I remembered—middle-aged, combed hair, sweater vest, and slightly overweight.

“Yeah, I’m back for winter break.” I decided to give my neighbor a try. “This might be a strange question, but do you know what happened to my family?”

“Oh, haven’t you heard?” he said merrily. “Your family has been starving themselves to pay for your college tuition. Isn’t that sweet?”

When I awoke moments later, I was about ready to scream.