(Untitled)
by entropie
“My head is someone’s dream. I’m tired of sleeping” —Crank, The Catherine WheelHow did I get here? Vaguely recall a chance e-mail encounter. Friends of friends. No solid starting points. Not in any of these years. And here I am, lost adrift and angry in a beat-up leather jacket and ripped jeans.
And I have never seen anything like this– gardens in the front and woods in the back. No noisy suburban neighbors to wave at or avoid while chanting in the back yard, wondering if they will ask what I am doing, wondering if they will tell my mother. No, not here. Free here.
Inside, a house, a real house. Not a temporary dorm or dingy college apartment. A whole house. Pagan. Full of art and arcane; candles, witchy books and statues. (Jauntily strewn about, not hidden under the bed!) Incense can be burned here. In my mind oddly juxtaposed with my mother’s pope plates and flannel-backed vinyl tablecloths.
I get a sense of what is possible, an alternative paradigm. I begin to learn their dream, try to make it my own. Gradual stagnation. Stunted growth. A somnolent decade passes.
This will fill my loss’s void. Cast out my blood family with their faith, hypocrisy, and dependency. Fleeing the old “homes” that have judged and rejected me. They said I could come “home” again. I long to be here. Anywhere. Elsewhere.
They welcome me to the “family.”
Family, indeed– People stuck with not chosen. No need to take on public behavior. Dispense with common courtesies. Blood can’t leave blood. Same roles, different actors. Familiar pain and dysfunction that I thought I’d left behind years ago. Unresolved, following me here. Again, the walls closing in, feeling trapped and without options. Again, feeling blamed and ashamed. That familiar sick feeling of free fall...
AWAKE with a start. Cold sweat from a haunting nightmare. Daydream gone dark.
Awake in a home of my own, with my own trees, bells, books and baubles. At home, at last, in myself. I have my own dreams now, but my life is in the waking, in the consciousness.
Real and alive and deliberate, I live.
Awake.
Awake and wary.
