by DC Renee
“Then love me enough to trust that I know what I’m doing. Love me enough to see me as a strong woman and not some weakling in need of everyone’s care. Just love me, and that will be enough to get me through anything.”
“Then you’re covered,” I told her.
“Good, then no more talking.”
And that was the end of that conversation.
Brooklyn
I was either having very vivid daydreams or was being slipped hallucinogenic drugs. Maybe I was going crazy. I was hoping for option two because both option one and three meant something was wrong with me, but what were the chances of that, right? I was sure my mental state was not looking so good.
That weird dream I had around Cassidy? I’d have liked to say it was the first and the last, but that wasn’t the case. They happened more often after she left. I would be transported into a different world out of nowhere. They were different but the same each time. I was an outsider looking in, but also a part of the grand scheme. It was like I was an extra in a movie but had a sneak peek at the secret plot ending—except I had read it some time ago, and the details were fuzzy. It was hard to explain just what I felt every time I was in one of those dreams.
I considered it a blessing that somehow it never occurred when I was around people, and if it did, it was always the tail end of one.
“You okay?” Grennan asked a couple of times.
“Yep, just thinking about a song,” I would always tell him. He’d nod like he got it. I was sure he would, had I been telling him the truth.
Most of the time, I was seeing a life that belonged to someone else … only, I was that someone else. I watched someone who looked like me singing, writing, arguing, laughing. There were so many moments in “my” life, and they were all grand. Sometimes, the girl looked just liked me, sometimes, I could only see her outline, and sometimes, her face was blurry, but I always knew it was me.
“Beer?” someone asked me in one of the episodes. It appeared I was at some party. Somehow, I knew it was an after party for some big concert. My own maybe?
“Nope, ‘beer before liquor, you’ll never be sicker,’” I sang.
“Only you could make that sound beautiful,” the girl responded with a laugh.
“Well, we’re doing shots!” I laughed too and then proceeded to sing part of the shots song.
“From punk princess to rock goddess to rapper,” the girl teased. “What can’t you do?”
“Nothing,” I teased back. “This is our life, let’s live it.”
I watched as the dream me threw an arm around her friend, but I never saw the friend’s face since it was blurry. We walked off to get a drink, happy and carefree. I couldn’t help but smile as I watched the scene. But right before the scene disappeared, something pulled my gaze away from the girl and me. When I looked to the left, I saw a lone guy against a wall, leaning and staring. I couldn’t see his face either, but I just knew … I knew it in my bones he was bad news. And then it all vanished. I was starting to believe he was the same person from my actual dreams. And he always seemed to be there somehow, not just in the crowd of a concert audience, but also lurking everywhere the dream me went.
Another daydream involved me simply walking down a hallway lost in thought. I could hear myself humming, very low, and oblivious to the world around me. I wondered if the dream me was having the same dreams I was having or if she was thinking of lyrics. I hoped it was lyrics for my sanity’s sake; not that this line of thought was good for my sanity in the first place.
Suddenly, she stopped and turned. I could feel the hairs on her neck stand up as if they were my own. I guess they were. She turned and looked over her shoulder, right at me, but it seemed as if she couldn’t see me. She looked right through me. Yet I felt like maybe she knew I was there because she sang one line, only one line. It was to the same tune she was humming, so I assumed it was a coincidence that the line was so absolutely appropriate.
“When I dream, the fear is real.” Her voice, my voice, was so lovely, but it felt haunted. I understood what she meant. Was she going crazy in her dream life the same as I was in real life?
Then she turned, and I was back to reality.
“Who’s there?” she asked in another dream. I turned and looked at what appeared to be a hotel room same as she did. Was she talking to me? I reached out and tried to touch her shoulder, but she didn’t seem to feel me. I was wondering if people could truly possess the ability of dream telepathy, and if maybe I had some form of it. It was all starting to feel like The Sixth Sense was coming to life, and it was staring me.
She kept turning right and left, trying to find whatever she was feeling. I dropped my hand, and I felt it too. There was something or someone else there with us, but I didn’t know where. The room seemed empty. All that came to mind was Paranormal Activity. I was honestly starting to believe all this stuff.
“Oh God,” the dream me said as she plopped onto the bed. “No more scary movies for me.” She chuckled to herself. I repeat, Paranormal Activity. She sat unmoving for a moment and then snapped her fingers as if she figured something out. Then she ran around the bed and grabbed the pad of paper on the nightstand and a pen and worked furiously. I glanced, but I couldn’t see what she was writing. The only thing I knew was they were lyrics.
The dream faded, but right before it all left, I saw a few lines.
What scares me drives me
What I fear makes me feel alive
What I cannot control will not end me
Because I’m already out of control
That was me. I was losing my mind. I was already out of control. I didn’t tell anyone. What was I supposed to say? “Hey Grennan, I think I’m crazy. I see things, and I hear people who aren’t real. Just wanted to give you a heads-up.” Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. If I told Cassidy, she’d tell me I was stressing out over the tour, and it was getting to me. If I told my parents, they’d be concerned for my well-being and send me to a doctor. Any way you looked at it, I was keeping this to myself.
I tried looking this up on the internet, hoping to find some valid disease that caused these episodes. I finally understood why people said never to diagnose yourself. It could have been a wide range of conditions, and none were ones I liked.
I managed to find some anti-anxiety herbal pills, some sleeping pills, and even body-balancing medicines too. It wasn’t as if I could see a doctor easily on the road, especially without anyone knowing, so I stuck with what I could get. I crossed my fingers and hoped they would help.
I was freaking the hell out, but somehow, it still seemed like maybe I was experiencing some weird stress-induced hallucinations. What I was stressing about, I had no clue. I thought maybe since Grennan and Cassidy were worried about me, their worry caused the anxiety in the first place. Maybe it was some pressure I was feeling about my lyrics being a hit for the guys. Like if the next album flopped, it would be my fault. Maybe it was because even though I loved Grennan like crazy and I knew he loved me, I didn’t know what the future held for us after the tour, and the closer it came to the end, the more nervous I became. We lived a few hours’ plane ride from each other, and although that hadn’t been a big deal before, I was used to being with him every day now. I attributed my dreams to all those factors.
But the moment I knew I was crazy was when I looked at myself in the mirror. A dream sequence didn’t follow. I wasn’t whisked away to my fantasy world. I was in the here and now, and I was staring at myself, but something was off. My image didn’t mimic my actions like it was supposed to do. When I turned, it stayed staring at me. When I opened my mouth, it pursed its lips. She was me, but she wasn’t me. And cue Paranormal Activity once again. I blinked, hoping that when I opened my eyes, I would be back to normal and realize I was just seeing things. Stupid mind, stop playing tricks on me, I told myself.
The mirror me was still different; then she opened her mouth even though mine stayed closed. “It’s only a matter of time.”
I screamed and jumped back. That had to be the scariest moment of my life. But the image in the mirror was now me, and both she and I were cowering in the corner of the tiny bus bathroom. And then the door opened two seconds later, and Grennan’s body was stuffed inside while I saw the rest of the guys’ heads poking in.
“What’s wrong? What happened?” The urgency in his voice had me this close to spilling my secrets, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell him that my mind was slowly chipping away. I straightened myself, controlled my shaking as best as I could, and smiled.
“I thought I saw a spider.” It was the best I could come up with under the circumstances.
“Jesus.” Grennan chuckled as his shoulders sagged in obvious relief. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Yeah, well, tell the spider not to scare the crap out of me next time, will ya?” I retorted with a smile.
The guys all laughed and then Grennan spent another minute looking for the spider before he announced that either I hadn’t seen properly or the spider was now officially gone.
“My hero,” I told him as I batted my eyes. Then I used his body to make me forget what had happened. It did the trick, and I convinced myself to put the whole scene out of my mind. That didn’t happen, but it found a place far enough into the recesses of my mind I only thought about it whenever I had another dream. And I didn’t have any more of those mirror image episodes … for a while.
Brooklyn
Sometimes in life, you watched something on TV and sarcastically commented with, “Yeah, right.” When you read a book, you responded with, “That wouldn’t happen in real life.” And when you heard a story, you said, “That’ll never happen to me.” Let’s face it, that was each of us until you became that same reality you thought virtually impossible. I never dreamed I’d be the star of my very own “yeah, okay, like that’d ever happen” moment, but I was. Exhibit A—I was crazy. Like I needed to see a doctor and get something prescribed because the dreams, the dreams, were becoming too much. And then that stupid mirror image thing had messed with my mind in a way I just couldn’t push back in my brain the way I thought I could. I mean I didn’t actively think about it, but it was there just under the surface.
I’ll tell you one thing that was a plus because of all that. My creativity skyrocketed. I was writing songs like a magician whipped out card tricks. And I was more involved in the instrumental part too. I was sure the guys were acting weird around me. Well, maybe not Cody or Trevor—Trevor because he didn’t care, and Cody because I was a girl, a “hot” girl, and I fed him. Gavin seemed wary around me, and something was a little off about Grennan, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. All I could think was that they knew. They knew I was turning into a mental case, and they were freaking out.
Things between Grennan and I didn’t change per se, but I was waiting for him to tell me it was time to go our separate ways. I didn’t believe that. He was still one hundred percent there with me. I never felt like his mind was elsewhere, and I never felt him pulling away. So, yeah, add paranoid to the mix of things going wrong with me.
Even with all that, I still told myself that it just stress. Broken record, right? I knew deep down I was just trying to calm myself. I knew I’d have to talk to someone, but I figured I could do that at the end of the tour when I was in one place for an extended period of time. Especially since the tour was almost over. Just a few more weeks. I also figured it would be good to determine where Grennan and I would be after the tour. We hadn’t talked about living arrangements, and I wondered how either of us would survive just visiting every so often as we had before the tour.
It was only when I saw myself in that weird mirror-state for a second time that I realized things were more serious than I was telling myself. See? Even that sounded crazy. Let me explain.
The stupid, stupid bathroom mirror. I officially hated bathroom mirrors. I was getting ready for one of the shows and putting on the finishing touches to my makeup when I looked up in the mirror. There she was. Me. Only, once again, it wasn’t quite me. It was the mocking image of myself, the one that didn’t follow me like a reflection should.
“Oh God, not again.” I actually said it out loud. I shook my head, but she didn’t. I felt the tears welling in my eyes as I looked at the ceiling. I wasn’t usually the praying type, but as I tried desperately to keep my hysterics at bay, I decided praying was just what I needed to do. “Please, God, let me stay sane. At least until this tour is over.” I looked back at the mirror, hoping I would be looking back at my reflection, but I still wasn’t.
I could literally feel my heart beat rapidly, the veins in my neck and temple matching the quick beating rhythm. My palms were clammy, and my hands were shaking. The mirror image at least looked exactly like I did at that moment, but she was increasingly paler, the shock on her face exactly how I knew I looked. And my eyes were so bloodshot it looked like I had been crying for days rather than trying to hold the tears at bay.
“What do you want?” I asked my own image. “What do you want?” I screamed at it a second time. You’re officially insane, I heard a small voice in my head.
The mirror image of myself stared at me, her red eyes wide as she delivered words I didn’t understand. “This isn’t the shape your life is supposed to be taking.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I raged at her.
“You know,” she responded. She actually responded. Dear Lord, help me. I’m talking to myself. “You know,” she repeated and was gone.
I ran out of the bathroom as if I’d seen a ghost. No, not a ghost. Worse. But then my movement became slow, so painfully slow. I knew I was in shock. I sat on the edge of the bed and just stared at nothing. My mind had shut down and was moving miles a minute at the same time. Don’t ask me how that was possible, it just was. I wanted to cry, to rage, to throw things, but I just sat there like a stone.
I didn’t know how long I stayed in that position. It felt like hours, but it might have been minutes, maybe only seconds. Nothing was right. Not my mind, not time, nothing.
“Brooklyn?” I heard Grennan’s voice, but I couldn’t respond. I just looked at him, but I wasn’t actually looking at him. I was looking through him.
I could hear my voice respond, “Yeah?” but I didn’t register my own mouth moving. I was in one of my own real-life dreams. I was both an observer and the main star; only this time, it was really happening.
“You okay?” he asked.
No. “Yes.” No, no, tell him you’re not. Tell him you need to talk to him about something. Tell him what’s going on with you. He deserves to know.
“This isn’t how I pictured doing this,” he said as he sat down next to me and pulled my hands into his. “But I never get things right around you. Shit, Brooklyn, you make me crazy.” Oh dear God, not him too. “Move in with me. Move in with me after the tour.” I was too numb, too shocked from everything, to understand what he was saying. It felt like he was waiting for me to respond, but I couldn’t process anything because my mind was still stuck on what happened in the mirror. “I can’t go back to not having you by my side after this. I can’t, Brooklyn. I need you with me always.” I would have said yes in a heartbeat. I would have jumped on him and kissed him senseless, told him I needed him too. I really did need him. I was sure the only reason I wasn’t falling apart, if you could call what was happening to me not falling apart, was because of him. But my mind wasn’t there. “Don’t worry, Brooklyn,” I heard his teasing tone. “Just say yes, and I’ll convince you why it’s a good idea after.”
Suddenly, my observer self and the main star got on board with the program and the paralyzed shock wore off. Except hysterical shock replaced it. It was all too much. I couldn’t deal with what was happening.
“I can’t do this; I can’t do this right now. I have to go, Grennan. I have to go.” I stood up and tried to run out, but he grabbed me in a hug.
“Shh, Brooklyn, I’m sorry if I did this all wrong. You don’t ha
ve to say yes right now. Just think about it, okay?”
“I can’t right now. I can’t. I have to go.”
“Please, Brooklyn, what’s scaring you? We’ll figure it out together.” If I had any room for more emotions, my heart would be breaking for him. He didn’t deserve what crap I was serving him, but I needed to get away to gather my bearings. I needed to calm my deteriorating mind.
“Please, Grennan, not right now. I need to go. I need some air. Please, I’ll let you know. For now, please let me go.” I all but tore out of his embrace and ran away from him. I didn’t look back because I knew what I would see. I’d see the pain etched across his face, pain that shouldn’t have been there, pain thanks to me. Selfish as it was, I had enough of my own pain for the moment; I needed to deal with that first before I could deal with Grennan.
He let me go. He didn’t follow me. Someone else might have been offended, but I was grateful. I ran for blocks before I tired and then just walked. I needed the crisp air in my lungs to keep my body straight, my body too tired to fight my mind, and my mind far away from all the things that mattered most so it could clear itself. I knew I needed some time to right myself, and that was just what I did.
Brooklyn
It took me silencing my phone and an hour, maybe two, of just walking around with nowhere in sight to get my head on straight. I felt bad for ignoring Grennan’s calls and texts, but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. Once I finally sorted my thoughts into buckets, I caught a taxi and headed toward the concert arena.
I would be upfront with Grennan. I would tell him everything I was experiencing. Okay, maybe not everything. I didn’t want to scare him off, but he had a right to know that I was clearly going mad. Then I would tell him I’d be more than happy to move in with him if the offer was still on the table after my confession; that it was something I wanted – or needed - probably more than he did. He grounded me.
