Madeline Brice "Dreamworld"

Dreamworld 
They died in 2015 and again in 2018 and one more time in 2019.
They died because I didn’t want them.
This last one in 2019 sparked a dissociative nightmare.
He died in October, our familial rock. Not in the sense that we told him everything and he possessed some sort of all-knowing truth. Not at all. He was mainly a lump of bones who sat at every gathering staring at the television, mouth breathing, hardly saying a word except for, “Goddamnit!” when one of the kids would do something wrong. For as long as I think back this is sort of all that I can remember him as, a lump. He was a conservative Catholic Republican with a bumper sticker on his car that read, “A baby is not a choice.” He’d pick my sister and I up from school and take us to our voice or violin or figure skating lessons and we’d listen to NPR before I ever liked it. Sometimes he’d buy us Wendy’s or McDonald’s if we were being good. He always drove a Buick sedan and ran into things often. To think what he’d say if he found out that not one but two of his granddaughters chose their abortions.
I fantasized about my dad’s funeral the other day, wondering if anyone would show up. I asked myself what years of drug use and chronic unemployment does to one’s image, whether anyone would care. It’s been years since we’ve spoken. I told myself that maybe if he was actually dead, there would be a real excuse for our lack of communication.
It’s a thickening pressure, it being grief. Like the day you told your mom you were pregnant and didn’t want it, her reaction made you leave the other two out. The urgency to have kids, to get married, to find a full-time job lingers through me, but is this what I want? Is this what you want? I find joy in picking flowers, kissing the cheeks of the ones that I love, laughing and laughing over sweet-smelling booze, wine-stained teeth, and slurring sloppy tongues. In solitude, I problem solve, meditate, spill my words out with paint, try to heal all of the wounds my twenty-seven-year-old bones can’t quite mend because “A baby is not a choice!”, but it is. I am mean, to myself, housing a festering inability to accept who I am and what I’ve done, but deep down I am proud. I lose control, remembering every unwanted touch that I have ever allowed, every dissociative drunken encounter blurrily pulsing through my mind. It feels distant like I’m always in the same room with it, yet we have only shared one conversation.
I moved to Kansas City in August and with that move a past version of myself I now grieve as I celebrate a new version reborn.
Dreamworld is an explorative and experiential journey working with metalized mylar; focusing on the self-processing grief, reflecting and refracting the world around me.