Weakness

Exhaustion.  The room spinning, head pounding.  Deep aches in my joints, in my muscles, sharp and intermittent pains in my internal organs.  It’s happening more and more frequently.  I’ve always been a bit prone to illness, but lately it seems worse, my body turning on me.

“Oh, that’s just God ans’rin’ our prayers, honey,” my mother tells me over a cup of coffee that I’d reluctantly agreed to meet her for.  Her voice is tinged with a deep Southern accent that I never picked up despite growing up in small-town Louisiana.  ”Not a day goes by that your daddy and me don’t pray up a storm for you, that God will throw obstacles in your path to lead you back to him.  I  know you don’t like it, an’ I know you don’t like me sayin’ it, but it’s the truth, sweetheart.  You will be miserable an’ sick an’ always runnin’ around in circles till you figure that out.”  She smiles at me, saccharine-sweet, as if her words had not cut me for the thousandth time.  ”We only do that ‘cause we love you.  You know that, don’t ya?”

I don’t answer her.  This is exactly why I’ve cultivated distance from my parents.  It took me years to realize that this is abuse, because it’s all I knew as a child.  Who the hell wishes harm on another in order to bully them into believing the “right” way?  I try not to hate her, because hate only eats me up inside.  It’s hard, though.  I hold back a simmering rage that only seems partially connected to my family’s treatment of me.  I’m never quite certain of the origins of that deep fury.

I’ve scheduled another doctor’s appointment, but I’m sure they’ll say the same thing they’ve always said.  They don’t know what’s wrong with me, why my body fails me.

The Song of Color

I often take long walks in my small-town Louisiana neighborhood, inhaling the scent of the wisteria, the oleander, the crepe myrtle that froth along the verdant lawns, melodic colors accented by the thrumming, subdued harmonies of the aging, peeling hues painted on the houses.  The warm spring wind caresses my cheeks, bringing with it the taste of rain, tiny droplets shimmering in the heavy air.  I turn my face to the overcast sky, my eyes picking out the subtleties of the swirls of violet and indigo, touches of warm green in the deepest shadows, a faint tinge of pink in the light, flecks of gold limning the edges of cloud where the sun peeks through.  Gray is not a word in my vocabulary— I see too many intricacies to use such a crude and overly simplistic descriptor.

I breathe in these colors, these refractions of light and music that dance in my mind.  They bring me a sort of peace, easing the ache in my head, my body, my soul.  I feel the life around me, and it makes me smile, a faint but slowly re-illuminated memory of joy and desperately earned freedom.

Nightmare

Dreams, too many dreams that sear themselves across my consciousness, choking me, smothering me.  I gag at the stench of burning flesh as smoke blinds me.  A layered, maddened scream tears through my hearing, shattering into laughter that sounds like broken glass scraped over stone, and I turn my head, feeling a sticky wetness against my cheek, trying to see the source of that chilling scream, though my stomach coils in horror at the thought.  All I can think of is Run.  Run.  Run.  But I can’t— they won’t allow it, these youthful and ancient men with insanity in their eyes that stand around my prone form.  I just want to wake up.  I am drawn from my burned and broken body like a last breath. I see a stoppered bottle from blurred vision-- how can I see with no eyes?  It is an ornate thing, this bottle, gilded, filigreed  and encrusted with amethyst, something that might hold perfume.  It is so much larger within.  This will house you temporarily until an appropriate body is found, they say.  You will forget, they say.  But you will remember one day, and when you do, we will be waiting.  There is a liminal echo of command, of threat to their words.

I just want to wake up.

Deeper

An excerpt from Evelyn Alvar’s first book in the Memoirs of a Tourist series, in which her heroine, Tara Midas, tries to describe her journeys:

“This world is so… three dimensional,” Tara said.  ”So flat.  You can only move along its surface, back to front, side to side.  The circumference of a clock.  But I’ve learned how to slip past that, through it.  I’ve learned how to fly.”  She considered these words in silence for a moment.  ”It’s not something that can be described.  Words are only symbols, after all, representational.  Powerful only because of what they describe, powerful because they bring a flimsy sort of tangibility to the intangible.  But the actuality is so much greater.”

Multitudes

We each of us contain multitudes, an infinity of being, of potential, of possibility.  Of what was, what is, and what could be.  We are all poured down countless paths all at once, here and everywhere.  In this infinity of self, this faceted eternity housed within a small outer shell, time is only a matter of perspective.

I am Moving, in my dream.  I am Flying, slipping through layers of infinity, and I can see so much that could be and could have been.  It isn’t memory, not exactly, not in the sense of a coherent, linear order of events, but it is the Past.  I am standing on a hill that ripples a deep amethyst under a sky that seems to reflect the color, waves of purple grass cascading across the ground like an an ocean, capped by frothy white flowers that surge and foam across the surface of that ocean.  I throw my arms out and tilt my head to the sky, as the wind whips through my silver-gold hair, my white dress.  I can feel the cold grass between my toes, and breathe deep of the fragrance of flower and grass, a hint of distant mountaintop snow on the wind.

I sing.  When I wake from this dream, I will not recognize the language, and it will rapidly fade from my memory, but for now the song is alive, breathing, reverberating through time and space and dimension.  Every molecule of my body quivers with it, resonates in harmony with everything around me.  The song expands outward, wave after wave rolling into the limitless expanse of All That Is, melody entwining seamlessly with harmony, shifting back and forth.  I am singing with the universe, as she too sings.  I could never sing solo.

When I wake, I am, for a moment, within my mind, still this silver-haired wild thing, feral heart pounding relentlessly.  I can still hear the song.  Musical language continues to reverberate in my mind, and I let it flow from my lips.

Then I am fully awake, and I realize with a feeling like tumbling into an abyss that such things are forever closed to me, except in dreams.