Dreams
I used to live in a place that got smaller and smaller until it was only a collection of a few rooms, just a narrow hallway of a space.
I found a door and then a stairway out of these rooms, where I discovered a vast untended house, missing its occupants – or whose occupants hide from me. I am stuck in this house feeling a tension between the vastness of this place to explore and the claustrophobia of not being able to escape.
What was that in the mirror? I find myself jumping at shadows. I am beginning to wonder whether they actually are my shadows. I remember I had one once. She chased me until she became a part of me, and I miss her. She was terrifying, but I knew her. She fused in order to follow me into these now familiar rooms. When she and I became the same, I no longer feared her.
The empty cup was once a discarded symbol of waiting. Now it is companionship and affection. It is a moment of comfortably resting in the shadows. It is taking a breath. Maybe my shadow is sitting next me now. She was foreign and frightening, until she disappeared into me, and now she is emerging as herself again. Whole, no longer frayed at the edges. What was I so afraid of finding in the silence all those years ago?
Reality starts to take form and merge out of the ethereal space, but it still doesn’t fully make sense. The plot never fully coalesces and the places never really existed.
The figures never quite have faces, but I know who they are. Often the ones trying to get into my space are actually me. The figures looming in the distance are actually waiting for me to join them. Their arms are open, and behind them is sunlight and not darkness.
Why did it take me so long to see that it’s a sunrise, and not a sunset?