My Heart is a Bear: A Fever Dream

Fever Dreams details a young woman’s recollection of her first love’s genesis while examining the fresh effects of heartbreak, namely, imagined visions of her first boyfriend. Following a particularly brutal rejection by her first love, Michael, visions of him begin to haunt the narrator’s mind as summer bleeds into the fall semester of her senior year of college. Seeking relief from these unusual and residual symptoms of first love’s failure, the narrator seeks assistance from the university counselor. Believing these “visions” to be simply metaphorical, the counselor instructs the narrator to keep a journal, written in third person perspective, chronicling the narrator’s first love in its entirety, from start to end. The intention was to gain perspective and a degree of separation but, as our narrator swiftly discovers, the visions only become more vivid and haunting, following her beyond fleeting moments of nostalgia and into day to day life, with her first love appearing at parties, weekend getaways, first dates, and even in times of danger. Still, the narrator believes that if she is able to finish her written recollection of this first love, that true perspective will be gained and the visions will cease, although that’s not guaranteed. The visions turn into tangible interactions that foster doubt and confusion in the narrator’s mind concerning the reality of how it all went down. During this time, the narrator enters into complex and alluring relationships with three different men, forcing her to confront elements of herself that have gone unchallenged, even in the recent writing of her past love. Friendship, romance, and reflection serve as a respite from her persisting visions until the real Michael appears at the semester’s end, right as the narrator had finished the journal, hoping the past would return to where it came from. What happens when the past asks for a place in our narrator’s future? Has the fever of first love finally broken, once and for all?