To be with you that, “I’m just glad you are here,” the thoughtless words blew through lips in a weak and pitiful sigh. I had had the same dream again. I stood behind. Latex smile stretching across the continent of my face as I watched the shadowed man walk into the temple with her. Hand in hand.
Both of them knew full well what they took with them, the other half of something which, if placed beside me, would make me whole. She wore the same ring he had made for me. In the dream I was still wearing it.
I stood holding a much smaller hand than hers. I was shaken. Attached to that tiny hand and outstretched arm hovered the most beautiful little face. Pale sun-touched skin with blushed cheeks, elven nose, pert velvet lips colored coral and every rose cliché. His pockets bulged with gifts from strangers who dared approach his ageless, silent, stable, grace.
Mother came into the road and took him out into the field to play as the whispering wind blew forcibly up against my back, wrapped itself around me, filled my lungs and wrenched my every hair–carrying glittering gold and granite dust thoughts, skittering in glints. Dots ricochet and pounce along the hall carved through dense apricot, persimmon and pineapple sky–high arching stories upon stories of window walls. Assfault narrow and curving to impasse, stretched from below.
The whispers of wind threaten him so much more than they could ever threaten me. In terms of us three, outside, only I can hear them. It was my dream. I was the broken one.
Innocence would keep him safe, though at times we experienced the same dream within the dream. He was safe even as he read the worlds that sentiments like theirs, that came and went before me, fabricate. Coal-red flags scrolling and waving from all windows.
I did not hate them. I was not mad.
A want for better for what is naturally and by birth, my own. The masquerades inside do little for any body. Understanding would come when they’d take hands with their own blood spilling through the shape of a child, a living breathing child, in order that they learn just what conscience would permit one to feed theirs. This was why I left him to penetrate the place no Lady should ever have to face on her own. We’d be walking in there, hand in hand, soon enough.
Orgiastic word-wars screamed from the heart of the infrastructure. Great displays of fitness, endurance, finesse and preparation seemed productive, it’s true. But evolution is, in effect, like sickness… epidemic, and reaching towards immunity. This world-war was missing something…
At the foot of the impasse, sprawled The Temple of Fiction. Preservering. I stood alone for a moment, wishing I hadn’t worn a skirt, facing the most perfect piece of architecture ever conceived.
My ring glinted in shifting reflections of the scenes surrounding me as I placed one foot before the other. One sign of my marriage to what I might find locked inside, battling or blindly suffering.
The ring wasn’t the point of the dream. I was to find our place within the temple, first.
Then I rolled over.
Then there was you.
