Happy Box

When I was a child I used to have night terrors. Not to be confused with a really bad night mare. While a night mare is usually a vivid scene, almost like a movie being played out with people you know and maybe a bad guy chasing you, a night terror is inexplicable, horrible shit. Not monsters or bugs or anything tangible, it is a dreadful, awful, terrible feeling.


I have been working on identifying the "dread" my whole like but it's pretty hard to put my finger on and now I have pretty much outgrown them. If I do feel one coming on, I can easily quell it at this age. But as a youngster, I had no grasp of what was happening and some hella drama (according to the 'rents) would unfold. My mom said I would be screaming bloody murder, looking kind of beside her so she always thought someone was behind her. My dad experienced them as a child too and we've discussed what we think may be going on in our heads but mostly we end up just laughing about how messed up the whole thing is. Our hands feel gigantic and our tongues seem to swell in our mouths while the roof of the mouth feels like coral reef. And the only thing we can really identify within the "dream" are giant spherical shapes. Balls, planets, what-have-you. 


This is ridiculous trying to explain this... and everyone's are different. 


Anyway. 


My dad remembers his mother taking him to the mirror or putting him in the tub to stop the night terrors so he would do the same for me. I remember waking up in my dad's arms so many times in front of the mirror, staring at my tear stained face with no recollection of how I got there, or why I was crying for that matter. My mom, however, didn't ever want me to wake up because if I came out of the dream state, I would remember everything. If I stayed unconscious, I would remember nothing. There were many a breakfast when I recall everyone quietly observing me as if I had strangled our family pet in the middle of the night but I had no idea the screaming fit that I had thrown in my sleep/wake/whatever. I'm not sure which one was better, knowing what had happened or the ignorance. 


But one specific incident when I was partially aware stands out in my mind and is often recapped by the fam. I was still in night terror phase but able to communicate. And this is what happened. I'm not telling this like, "listen to my dream last night!" This is what went down. In real life.


I was in the living room but do not know how I got there. Everyone was there. Mom was sitting by me on the couch in her pj's and thick opaque glasses, Dad, who is really tall and has my skinny legs, standing in his man-panties, and poor Alyssa, half asleep on a chair who was always there through all this shit. Poor girl had to sleep with me for years while this was happening. When she went to kindergarten, I had them for a week straight I was so stressed out. Yes, this three year old "stressed out." 


I was crying. Wailing. That ridiculous sobbing kind of crying only a night terror and my extremely high fever could induce. I must have been hallucinating. I was for sure out of my gourd. 


My dad was standing before me, almost yelling at me in half sleep mode, desperation in his voice, "what do you want!? What can we do for you!?" 


Me, whimpering, sobbing, asleep: Ah waaanna haaapy baax.


Dad, shoulders confused, hands gesturing wildly, feet coming off the floor in frustration: What!? What the hell is that? You want a what!?


Me: A haappy baaxxx. Ah wanta *sniff* *sniff* happy baaaaax.


Dad: A HAPPY BOX!? YOU WANT A HAPPY BOX!?


Me, alone in the world, hands between my small knees, staring off into the terrible unknown, still crying, head slowly nodding in approval: A happy baax.


My father blundered out into the garage for a solid ten minutes while my mother attempted to console me and Alyssa perked up on her chair, unable to break away now. This was just getting good. What the shit was a happy box? And how was Dad going to make this happen? 


We heard the banging around and the falling of junk from the garage, maybe a curse or inaudible utterance as the 28 year old man searched for something to make his little girl just stop crying already, and soon returned with a Payless shoe box he had wrangled up in the garage. He had crafted little smiling faces on the box and upon his opening it for me, found another smiling face inside the box. 


This pleased me. The crying ended. And I smiled. The whole family sighed with relief. 


The freaking weird ass kid just needed a happy box.