in which our protagonist finds himself staring sadly at his body from above, wondering how he could have left it this way

"Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help. Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round. They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a roaring lion. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death."
-- Psalm 22


I awake with a start every time, with the taste of hot grey dust still lingering in my mouth. Before I can even lift my head to face the day the feeling fades, and I would give anything to have it back. I dream about the desert less and less these days, as if I am losing it, and it frightens me. It was a risk to take, I know: not just the three-thousand mile trip, the people I'd never met, the carnival madness of the festival, the city on the plateau; these things were all dangerous in their own right, but far worse is the giving of yourself, investing a piece of your soul in something you must leave behind. I have been given something in exchange, a glimpse of the divine and a memory of myself in the company of incredible beings, and every day I use it as a shield against the dead hands that grasp at me as I walk through this city and this life - I hold it crumpled tight in my fist like a love note. Like a promise of hope.

And every day it seems that a piece of it slips away quietly, and I feel as though one more section of my armour has been stripped away, and oneday soon I will have nothing left to ward off the blows of this place. It is a terrible thing to have walked with angels, to have even walked where angels might fear to tread and demons hush their voices to a whisper, and now? Now I lay broken against this dark city wall, struggling to keep my face turned away from these dead eyes in cold white faces, from clammy hands and grasping, bony fingers. When I look around, I wonder what on earth these unliving things would take from me: surely I have nothing they could possibly want? If I was rich, perhaps: if I was famous or beautiful or talented, but I have nothing these dead want to own; my head and my heart and my hands deal in a light that is worth nothing to them, my tongue speaks words that are ugly and meaningless to their ears. No, they would reach into my chest and pull out my fainting heart only to have taken it - they would eat every part of me just for the joy of consuming, until there is nothing left to recognise.

When the sky comes tumbling down around me, when I have sat slumped with my back to the locked door, sobbing raggedly for fear and hatred of all that waits outside it, this is when I wake with the taste of the hot, grey dust in my mouth and the lingering pressure of a friend's hand on my shoulder. And it is in these brief moments, lying with my eyes still closed and the memory of grit in my mouth and nostrils, that I can feel my frenetic heartrate slow and my aching muscles unknot. The dream breathes in my ear, and I can still feel the hard-packed earth stretching out for miles under my back; the cloudless sky punctuated by a hundred thousand galaxies, somehow combining utter blackness and the deep, soulful cry of blues and reds; the bitter lime taste of the alkaline dust on my skin and tongue. Even the fire on the horizon, the madness and joy a half-mile away only contributes to the sense of a totality of peace: when I desire lights and laughter and the sweeping exuberance of life, it is there for me; for now I choose to be alone, and no-one will force me to do otherwise. The chaos and the peace, the angels and the demons, the fire and the sparkling blue-black darkness, we all know how to communicate - how to interact, but when to leave well enough alone. Despite the divisions in my nature, despite my fractured beliefs and the confusion in my mind, I dream myself back to this primitive, mysterious peace: once sensed and never forgotten; once experienced and never yet repeated.

This is the dream that lingers as hot, grey dust in my mouth, that struggles to wrap its fragile skein around my aching and battered body and smooth over the armour chinks in my tired soul. It surrounds me and fills me and makes me promise one thing over and over again: that I will not give up hope. No matter what happens, no matter how far down they drag me or how many pieces of me they try to call their own, there is always this dream of how things were in the simplicity of the desert, and how things will be again. Maybe not there, not in that place or in that way, but I have hope that oneday I will feel clean air envelop me again, and know the clean, open lines of simplicity.

I know that I am not alone. When I feel my father's strong arms around me, when I hear my grandpa's wry chuckle as he jokes with his students, I know what it is to love and be loved unconditionally; when I catch my sister's eye across the room and only we know the joke, when I can almost feel my mother's fingers loosen and flow out across the piano keys and I want to sing and sing and to have a voice good enough to add to the beauty that spreads out through the house - I still remember the early days in this country, an alien lost and uncertain, but being gently rocked to sleep every night by her music from downstairs working its way into my dreams, and waking to his fingers tip-tapping gently at the computer down the hall, weaving a tune of his own in the cold English pre-dawn. Who says he knows love? I know love, says the littlest one.

My head aches as I write this, and I run my hand through my hair as if I could pull it out by the roots, and the dull pounding with it. Eventually I will crawl into bed and lay, no more or less alone than any other night, until the world's lights come back on again and I can pretend that the bleak, ugly dawn that rises over concrete and plastic is the fierce, singleminded heat of the desert, rising in triumph to blaze for one more day, at least - battles won, at cost, in the night. Dawn is no victory, here, it is only a sign of the times: time to get up, time to stop dreaming, time to face reality.

Everyday that I am awake with the dawn, ready and willing to let another piece of me die, I pray, and I promise myself this: oneday.

Oneday, I will see the sun again.

... and your young man shall dream dreams ...

"The heart cannot say, sometimes, but the hand and eye - if steady enough and clear enough - may shape a window for those who come after. Someone might look up one day, when all those awake or asleep in Sarantium tonight are long dead, and know that this woman was fair, and very greatly loved by the unknown man who placed her overhead, the way the ancient Trakesian gods were said to have set their mortal loves in the sky, as stars.

Eventually, morning came. Morning always comes. There are always losses in the night, a price paid for light."
-- Guy Gavriel Kay, Lord of Emperors


EASTER MORNING GHOST

You see this rough and ready frame?
It's walked the world, my silent friend:
I've tasted blood and grit between my teeth
and fought the desert, had it fight me back;
I've felt the Scottish sunsets take my hand
and lived to see the sunrise bear me home,
all weak and bloodied from that other world -
the battles won, at cost, against the night.
This body has its breaks and scars:
the cold white iron of demon claws,
the fiery lines they branded in my side,
my wrists, because I would not let them win.
I've held those demons on a leash,
I've held them by the throat and felt them beg
to be released - I've held them till they died.
This is the man I am, my silent friend,
but who are you?

I sensed you laughing gently in the dark
and knew despair - not mine, but yours,
as if you'd left it far too late to scream,
had swallowed up the sound and choked it down
until it grew and grew, took root and thrived
and wrapped its clinging vines around your spine.
I hear your bitter laughter edged with hope
and cry to see that long-forgotten scream
tear free and blossom into life,
in beauty and in solace and in pain,
like Eden bursting from your troubled breast.
I dreamt you thus - but when I woke
you were a fleeting flash of green
I couldn't place: who were you, silent friend?

I face the morning old, and so alone:
the wanderer and warrior confined;
the old man's eyes within a young man's face.
I put my back against these books
and face the wall, as if my longing stare
could pierce these bricks and gloomy city streets,
could travel on these Easter eagle's wings
and rise, unfettered, to the place you wait.
Who are you, Easter morning ghost?
Your presence fled before I learned your name,
but I can say with certainty and faith -
the faith of old men dreaming dreams
and young men's visions springing into life
- that I shall see you long before we meet.
And so, despite these walls I yet remain
two parts uncertainty, but one part hope.

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