And sometimes, sometimes it feels like I had to climb forever just to reach the summit of the highest mountain in the world, and when I reached that snow-rimmed peak, the stillness of the vast white that surrounded me seemed to come at me like a hurtling, careening juggernaut that sought to overwhelm me completely.
My senses numbed. My body staggered. My mind adrift. I no longer felt myself as myself, but rather as an after-image of what I'd been up to mere moments ago. A reflection on a shattered mirror, broken, twisted shards as metaphors of infinite possibillities.
Before me, a wide chasm loomed ominously; as far as I looked, I could fathom no limit to its depths. Maybe it went on forever, maybe it was just an illusion. Briefly, briefly I wondered what dread creatures might dwell on those ancient and murky depths : eldritch krakens, the likes of which this world has not seen in untold ages, and long since banished from their oceanic roamings, or maybe the remnants of civilizations so old that the world itself forgot they ever existed.
In thoughts like these did my mind linger absently, as my body fell and arced limply towards and into the yawning maw of the abyss I fell. For an aeon of aeons did I fall, until at long last I finally fell from grace to wakefulness.
A dream. A dream, it was, and nothing more.
And as I lay in bed with my eyes still shut, I find myself yearning for a darkness that pervaded my slumbery descent - I feared, and rightly so, that the day's light could be too much for me to bear. But as reality pulls me from the last lingering strands of sleep, I wake to find that someone else does lie beside me. My mind still addled, I fail to understand what this unknown quantity actually means. Intently I stare at this whimpering, smiling mass, and it takes me a while to realize that it might as well be nothingness, for it was not you. This realization causes and overbearing sense of grief and sadness to wash over me. My eyes gaze uncertainly at the carcass that sleeps next to me : looking, searching, questioning. I feel as if my hand had been almost forced, and that this undesired presence was the one way to fill a seemingly unending void left by your leaving, but the emptiness that still threatened to engulf all of creation was surely the universe's way of telling me that the only thing that could fill these abyssal depths, the only and right you-shaped form was your very self, the one treasure that would forever remain out of my reach.
And so I hold on tight to this thing which draws no feelings from me, cursing the day I was ever so weak to steer clear of it... praying against all hope that it will not be here when my life resumes its sense of normalcy.
My eyes, heavy with sleep and wearied by sorrow, close again. Just before I fall asleep, a stray prayer escapes my lips.
No comments:
Post a Comment