Beyond
Sometimes, when the mirrored framework that holds her does not shiver and crack a hairline’s breadth to release her for a fleeting journey, Evelyn sleeps like anyone else; and when she sleeps, she dreams, and remembers.
Sometimes the dreams are nightmares, blood and fire and battle, suffocation as she is drawn into spaces too small, too dark, the echo of cruel, commanding voices coiling around her mind like serpents. But they aren’t always this.
There are dreams that she feels more than she remembers when she wakes, as if the entire structure, the entire language of image and emotion she expresses within them is something so far beyond her limited physical dimensionality that her waking mind struggles to translate. She knows there is a pulsating intertwining of color and song; everything is song, even the trees, the stars and the planets, the wind and the seas, the biting things that crawl in the dark and the yawning chasm of emptiness at the edge of sanity. They all sing in these dreams, and she is a part of the melody, a harmonious chorus that weaves and dances and spirals through all things. She doesn’t have a name for what she is, but she does have a Name, and it is her song as much as it is her, her part of the chorus, and that song swims and dives through layer upon layer of Time and Space and Potentiality as if through a bottomless ocean depth.
She can sometimes feel herself flitting on the icy North Wind like a spray of snowflakes, or the frigid whisper of winter, or like the Wind itself, perhaps- though no, no, these words are still too constrained to the surface of things. She has been, has lived, has had existence, does have existence. Someday she will be truly free again, though sometimes she thinks that might be lonely.
Sometimes the dreams are nightmares, blood and fire and battle, suffocation as she is drawn into spaces too small, too dark, the echo of cruel, commanding voices coiling around her mind like serpents. But they aren’t always this.
There are dreams that she feels more than she remembers when she wakes, as if the entire structure, the entire language of image and emotion she expresses within them is something so far beyond her limited physical dimensionality that her waking mind struggles to translate. She knows there is a pulsating intertwining of color and song; everything is song, even the trees, the stars and the planets, the wind and the seas, the biting things that crawl in the dark and the yawning chasm of emptiness at the edge of sanity. They all sing in these dreams, and she is a part of the melody, a harmonious chorus that weaves and dances and spirals through all things. She doesn’t have a name for what she is, but she does have a Name, and it is her song as much as it is her, her part of the chorus, and that song swims and dives through layer upon layer of Time and Space and Potentiality as if through a bottomless ocean depth.
She can sometimes feel herself flitting on the icy North Wind like a spray of snowflakes, or the frigid whisper of winter, or like the Wind itself, perhaps- though no, no, these words are still too constrained to the surface of things. She has been, has lived, has had existence, does have existence. Someday she will be truly free again, though sometimes she thinks that might be lonely.