The After Images

when life seems far stranger than the fiction.

Metafiction.... I need to look that up. How meta can you get, before all the day's proceedings become calligraphy of the archetypes, painted in a passing hand, on the face of the moment?

Last night, another day in another life. I was in college somewhere. Stone campus. She's blond, and I know that we get on well enough as long as I don't ask anything too deep. I smoke cigarettes, but adamantly do not drink. Something to do with a past I could bother to dredge up if I really cared to. But to be honest, in the progression of the daily rhythm, it doesn't really cross my mind. I'll know it when I need to.

I began to wonder, somewhere, at some point, why try as I might, the only thing that forced the waking to be any more resolute than the dreaming, was that I chose to interact with it that way.

We meet up after class. I'm tired, something the night before, strange dreams, I tell myself. This, maybe, that, too.
In this life, I have an injury I never attended to. A bum right shoulder. Which in the archetype of my personal momentum, represents an earlier self. Current life current self typing meta, I have repaired the injury at painful lengths. Like peeling back burning ribbons. One blessed centimeter at a time.
Earlier, on the killing fields, the shoulder is an archetypical depiction of my limitations, my mortality. I have felt the axe sink deep into my clavicle... many times. Older days. To see the dream of healing... I must be sleeping better.

Alternate, Stone campus, blond commiserate. The mood is weird on the campus today, I reach back to what I perceive is the yesterday story that makes the today experience make sense, and the calm confident voice I aspire to embody leaves the details and says 'yes.'
It tastes like a mix of disbelief, and sanctity. Like the heavens parted to drop a headstone, to remind us children that greater dogs sleep under the earth.
Turns out I'm right. We walk into an arch I don't question, because the calm confident voice identifies it as "the nest."
In the stone ledge, a carol that once cupped angels, now empty for public image, and a portrait of a handsome young somebody no longer attending.

There is more to this particular alternate, it's contextually foreign to this now meta typing. I have a limp. Right knee. An injury prevented by yoga, more timeline. This 'I' has not corrected the shoulder, the gravelly older mentality carried forward long enough to embrace the knee injury currently avoided.

I limp behind her, she walks slow. I know her name is Cara, but I don't say it in my mind. To me, it's just the two of us in tandem. I won't fall in love with her yet, it's too early in the season. All of this seems like a quiet background melody of choice and decision in the back of this alternate me's mind. Silent currents, carrying me through this dream.

We have come to make love. Part of me knows that. But I also know it is far off from this moment, maybe an infinite span away; which is not to say that I am impatient to bed her, but that in the moment we light the candles and tip them, melting pools of wax to hold them before the memorial, part of me accepts that the world might just end before we get there, and that that is an acceptable condition.

The now of this memorial, her slight tremor as she presses the long-stemmed candle down, (so foreign amongst the other tea lights, an orange drum with three wicks, a squat red mess run to ruination), it stands for me as full and immediate as any cold wind of the killing ground.

She half sits, a moment, and looks back to me.
"He was in my civics class. I saw him do a power point."
She looks to the portrait, lost in the unfamiliarity of moments like these.
"Did you know him?"

I'm holding my cigarette in the freshly lit candle, since sacred fire burns the leaf just as well as the others will.
The calm confident voice within me says 'no.'
"I think we may have met in passing."
I take a deep breath, and silently repeat his name to myself. I see it printed on the portrait. I let the hot vent out to the sky, and press the filter into the molten ruin of the red one. In this moment, It feels right. A sacrifice of some of my leaf. Sending smoke to the heavens. It fits.

She observes this, and merely watches. It is why we get on so well. My rituals from forgotten lifetimes, are her anthropological relics. Small performances, by her previously broken yet somehow noble black wolf.

The love we will make tonight, it will be different. I know this in advance. The leaf replaced with grass, the rhythm replaced with soul. It will be an act of confirmation, of communication, of hope. Slow to start and sacred to finish.
In the house of recent death, all performances regain their sacred authenticity.

"He was a nice guy. I'm sorry I didn't talk to him more."

I try, I really do try to keep thoughts like the one I speak to myself. I know the world doesn't operate so close to the mystery. Sometimes, to grace the dead, the honesty is the only honorable path.
"Someday, you just might get to do that."



I have wondered about the dreams, but only so long as I have held myself at a distance to them. While they were hectic, mysterious, distorted images like the colors of light through vapor, I wanted to control them, or own them, or shut them out entirely.
The more I observe them, though, the more I enter them, the more I see?
Now, I feel the current. Now, I follow the moment.
And the more I learn to recognize myself amidst the dreaming, the more the dream logic unveils itself to me in passing, the more I find myself returning to a thought I dreamed up somewhere, at some point;

That I am many people, and what makes me more aware of myself, is that every one has the habit of looking up into the night sky, and feeling their own presence elsewhere.

Perhaps, in dreams, in passing.

Author's Note

This is a written excerpt of a much longer dream of equal clarity, which ironically did end before the heretofore mentioned moments of passion. Ironic, somewhat.

I encourage all comments, please do speak your mind, but to this one, a notice:

The recording of this, is like the drawing of a flower. A depiction of a force of nature, that is textural before it is accurate. I list it as metafiction, because it is the metafiction of my own dreaming life. It is a story, in that it is meant to entertain. It is written to be experienced.

Ergo, yes there are fragments. Yes there are lines that will just not make sense of the first read. By writing it down at all, I may be capturing images of the intentionally elusive.
Comment, but know that I'm not seeking 'correct'-ness.
not this one.

and to end, a question:
taken the quiet background current of decisions this showed me, how awake was I? Am I?
Are you yourself?

Fin