Wallpaper

Monica. Before I was born my parents were so convinced that I was going to be a girl that they picked out a name for me. Monica. They did not stop at the name, no. They went so far as to decorate my bedroom for their little girl. Oh, yeah.

There were two different wallpapers in the room separated by a chair rail. The bottom wallpaper was striped, thin lines of no more than a quarter of an inch, colored red, yellow, green and white. Ok. Fine The chair rail was a bright, sunny yellow. And the wallpaper on top, oh, the wallpaper on top was very special. The background was that grassy green color so typical of the seventies, but the main attraction of the wallpaper were these large, multicolored flowers of red, white and yellow petals that dominated the entire canvas, as it were.

The flowers were about as big as my hand is now and equally spaced in diagonal lines running from the ceiling to the chair rail. Connecting each and every one of these large flowers-it was a small room but there were hundreds of these fuckers-was a line of smaller flowers, similarly colored. So gay.

As I got older ad sleep started to escape me, I would lie in bed at night and count the small flowers until sleep finally claimed me. Sometimes I would get to sixty or seventy, sometimes into the hundreds. I could see the flowers because I always slept with the light on, terrified that someone would break into our house and kill us all in our sleep. Of course, sleeping with the light on doesn’t really make all that much sense, in retrospect, cause if you can see them they can see you…

I also slept with one of those hospital guards on the side of my bed because I was then, and still am, a fitful sleeper and I would often wake up at some point in the night on the floor next to my bed.

Finally, when I was about thirteen, my parents finally agreed to change the wallpaper. I wanted this football themed paper that had the helmets of every the professional teams all over it. I had never watched a football game in my life. I just wanted something masculine, you know. We settled on grey. Grey on top, white chair rail and a different grey on bottom. Boring but better.

I stopped sleeping with the light on but I was still scared. I started sleeping on my stomach with the covers pulled over my head as tightly as possible, leaving a little space for my mouth and my nose so that I can breathe. To this day, I still sleep with the covers over my head. The problem now is that I’m trapping myself with the monsters in my head. And they’re so much more destructive than the ones in the real world.