Chapter 5: The Shadow Awakens

Dear sister,

Again. Last night nightmares racked me in fear and I awoke so suddenly the pictures on my bone white walls had to right themselves in my sight. It's the same shadow, over and over, coiling and uncoiling itself in many of the rooms in my mind. And I miss you Aryn, I miss waking up hungover on your couch, groaning and listening to you tell your story of hearing me talk in my sleep through the walls. I miss telling you my stories, so I'm telling you one now, for fear it will overtake me and pull me to live in its ink-like night forever. I only hope that in describing this slinking presence, a few more rooms in my head will be bathed in light. Even now I can feel him pushing out through my mouth, eager to tell his own story, thrilled for an audience, and I have no energy to resist. 

 I have dreamed of him (her?) since the time I saw you disappear with dad into a deep hole, your screams bouncing upwards and around the smooth cylinder that was your prison. I can easily remember the moment I awoke from that dream, and how I ran on padded feet quickly to your door with the 'Stay Out!' sign signaling me even then to heed its message. I did not, and took one of those deep relief breaths when I saw you curled up in your bed, Madonna posters staring fiercely down at my trespassing. Next door was dad's, and the moonlight cast its friendly glow over mom and dad sleeping side by side as if to say, 'See? See how I take care of your parents and wrap them in my nighttime embrace? I will not forget you little one, I will not forget you even when storm-clouds burst above you, and the stain of your Id creeps closer to the surface.' 

Back in bed, my high bunk-bed perch, I couldn't shake your pleas for help from my mind. I knew somehow my dream scape had changed irrevocably, that somewhere in the pattern of my nocturnal travels a thread had unwound itself, and I would never weave a tighter knot. I knew that your pale moon-shaped face would stare upwards at me from five meters down for years to come, and that my dad's helpless stare would always burn a hole somewhere in me where holes were never supposed to exist. Then, last night, he awakened with a fury, and I'm now I'm scared. There is no defense, my lovely sister. I cannot halt my imagination from jumping into realms where hammers clang and my shadow, that pestilent presence, crests barns, burns through fields and bounces over telephone lines like the ululating echo of a wolf dancing in between canyon walls, just to find me. 

And it found me when I spoke with my sage, damnit! I was making peace with myself, contentment and tears were mixing an elixir for me and that fucking shadow found me even then. Listen:

"You want it from the beginning?"

"Yes," replied the sage quietly, folding her dress like cirrus clouds around her.

I closed my eyes.

Hunched, thousands of feet in the air at a place of terrible mountainous beauty,

I unrolled my life like a film reel,

decades of life whirring softly, mixing with the air lifting my sage's hair with invisible fingers.

I began: "There were pines whispering,

a fire with sparks crackling under a sky smelling as crushed juniper.

There was a group around this fire, I was one of them, she the other.

Who existed on that small square of earth but me and her?

There was her hair, the color of a silhouetted horizon moments before darkness.

There was her skin and smile tender like a quiet snowfall

There was...

The vision has vanished," I ended,

longing etched in my irises as they closed the aperture between life and dream.

"There are tears damned up behind your eyes, gentle one,"

my sage replied.

"Some teardrops could fill oceans, others a small mountain stream,

though all must eventually flow,

smoothly, as a waterfall of words."

You loved her?" my sage queried as she reached out fingers like daydreams and touched my eyes,

blinding me momentarily.

"No, I have never stopped," I thought to myself

in my mind stunned to see my sage smile in acknowledgement.

I covered my mouth hurriedly, believing I had slipped secrets too deep,

and my sage removed her hand, furling her hand tightly inside her dress,

restoring sight,

her form a nimbus cloud now growing in front of me.

Doggedly I continued, strengthened by the lightning in her eyes.

"I remember a snowy evening.

I remember being in love with snowflakes falling around her,

linen white on her hair black as volcanic glass.

I remember capturing it in a photograph and feeling tears,

tears like a slow fire

film over my eyes when years later, forced to throw the photo away

I sat on a park bench and sobbed and shook.

I trembled for my loss

and silently screamed through the early Saturday mist."

Realizing my eyes had been closed, hooded in memory,

I lifted them, openly crying,

and saw my sage standing silently,

gazing outwards.

I followed her gaze, distracted momentarily by what seemed her shifting shape

now a stratus clouds in front of me, rising to fantastic heights,

where the object of her fascination circled lazily around us.

A hawk I have seen often in my dreams and days.

A hawk with piercing eyes staring not at me or my companion,

but at a shadow hidden in the crags some fifty feet below where I stood.

A shadow eerily familiar, a black stain moving swiftly upwards.

With every pass of lichen smothered granite rock,

the hawk circled lower, while my pacific sage urged me to continue.

"I remember her underneath me, almond colored curves rolling into me,

her two eyes satellites on a face honeyed with tenderness

her breathing shallow like a rain puddle

then river deep.

I remember the small of her neck cupped beneath my hand,

pulling her lips thick with desire towards my hunger.

I remember the earth sinking and the heat of her movements coiling around me.

I..."

Kriiii! screamed the hawk, shattering my reprieve.

And at that moment I saw three things simultaneously.

    My greedy umbra moving closer to where I stood with vicious speed,

    My sage becoming a cumulonimbus cloud protecting my thoughts in rain

    My hawk with shadow-streaked talons then, triumphant.

All around me quiet little raindrops whispered, filling the void.

"Hear my voice, gentle one,

I will cry for you.

I will wrap your enigmas in my own tears,

I will warm you against sorrow."

So it follows me still, Aryn.  Where did he come from? Why is he greedy, sometimes with long saber-like claws, sometimes with blunt edges that thump against my subconscious? Why does he stain stories and chapters with a squid-like streaking, turning blue then purple, then nightmare black. Ahhhh, elusive, elusive, like the outline of my aircraft on my first solo trip on an early, icy Midwest morning. Have I told you about that? About the dawn that bled all over the sky in smudges of gold, rust and Valencia orange?

I could sense the shadow of my plane rather than see it, bouncing along below me through cornfields half-horizon in size. I had completed my first hundred hours, and words even now vanish as wisps of fog through fingertips that could describe my elation at sitting perched six thousand feet above the ground in a machine that blended death and pleasure in a roaring package. Yet, every time I dipped my wings, I saw it slipping alongside me, thousands of feet below, never tired, never fatigued of the chase. It was the same feeling, darling, the one that crept around behind me as I looked down into the hole you and dad were stuck in, eyes rivers of sadness, arms outstretched for you even as he wrapped his arms around me from behind, suffusing me in blackness, digging his long cat-like nails into my stomach, pulling me backwards and out of my nightmare. Even now I can hear his hiss in my ear, and feel my own fingernails digging into my stomach, thin arms encircled around my strangled pillow as I awoke. I don't want to meet him anymore, and know that I will, Aryn. Even as I write this to you at a time when night has cracked daytime in half and spilled it over a different horizon, I know what awaits and I don't want to sleep. My imagination sometimes can be madness.

all love,

me.