My memories flow around me, in a torrent of multi-colored water. An infinitely small slice of time experienced representing a single droplet of liquid. The positive collection of moments forms the most pleasant of areas, bright colors and gentle waves. The negative areas form torrential storms and roiling waters. My consciousness walks along the surface, my footsteps across the shifting surface sending ripples forever across my sub-consciousness. My thoughts are each miniscule wave that reverberates out like the movement of sound across the skin of a drum. Sometimes, they strike an object, flotsam and jetsam left by others that have come into my life. Their consciousness’s touch my own, floating along in a paper boat, absorbing the water within words they utter to me. This world has no rules, and no boundaries with which they can operate within. These boats, transmuted by emotions, become more than life craft created from pulped vegetation. Instead, they join the sea, rooting themselves in an island of moments, forever imprinted while they sail. Like the movements of the continents, their existence within me moves along the slivers of time they have made themselves of. They build, create. Papyrus becomes stone, steel, dirt. Islands of glorious beauty arise from the roiling multi-colored waters, splashing up against their rocky shores, the smooth beaches. Some drift like a man lost at sea into the dark areas. The rain that falls in these terrible places filled with my imperfections, boil away the emotional alchemy. Poison, acid, the droplets eat away at the bonds holding the material together and soon the island is destroyed. Ripped away by the scared visitor who cries tears of black. I watch. My footsteps carry me into those storms and I watch as every droplet of imperfections destroys every created bond or link, leaving behind whatever floating wreckage that refuses to be dismantled. I watch, and I learn.
Today, my footsteps carry me onto the shores of a new island. A fascinating place of memory and an astonishing case...so quickly has it built itself, and so swift the person commanding the consciousness that drives the emotional alchemy has worked their way into my core.
The bright white sand sinks as my weight is applied, parting for my presence and accepting me. Soft waves of deep blue wash away my trail, consuming the particles of time I have shifted, only to deposit more in a dynamic display of emotion. On this small beach I see thousands of lights, dimmed in the rays of sunlight, but sparkling vividly to me still. I can feel them, the photons hitting me from hundreds of directions, penetrating my very being. Apprehension, and nervousness, residual emotions echo from across the waves, pounding into my back even as my path continues forward, into the crystalline forest that dots this particular island. Between two monoliths I walk, and I can feel it. The fear shocks me as I’m forced to sit, as I’ve done before. Waiting…my focus on the fears of the two towers of transmuted time. My consciousness could be crushed by either rejection to my right, or disappointment to my left. Soon though, the visitor arrives, pulls me from my place with a warm smile, before skittering off like a playful fairy into the forest. I do not catch the form, what projection it has assumed, but I follow…
Soon I am no longer walked, I fly along in a silver chariot, pulled by invisible horses into the forest. The forest blurs from crystal to steal and asphalt, then finally to dust and dirt…a road that snakes up the side of a monstrous rock formation. I look out from my seat and can see the shore of the island, yet I have not gone far. I feel small in comparison to the alchemical wonder that built this titan I now climb. The wind caresses my skin, chilling the flesh as the chariot races on. I can feel the consciousness next to me, a constant smile on it’s face. I hear the words, my lips move as well. But the chariot moves too fast, and they are whipped away on a breeze of time, lost along the road we both now travel. Beauty returns, vegetation sprouts up around us, white powder coat the sides of the titan, hanging from the branches. The summit is reached and the scene shifts as we disembark. The ground is hard beneath our feet, the wind cold yet caressing, soothing both of our raging souls. I notice then, the definite form: silken hair, pale skin and perfect teeth. My consciousness reaches out, testing my mind. Reality cannot be so kind to me. Gingerly, dark skin touches pale, and the image doesn’t immediately shatter. I am relieved, but the world blurs around us. No longer are we on a titan’s back, our hands outstretched towards the gods above. It is dark here…
Dim lights and laughter fill my mind. I can’t seem to make out everything around me, but it doesn’t matter. My focus is sharpened to a point, and embedded into the soft wooden table that separates our two entities. Laughter flits across, occasionally interrupted by a brief visitor, an annoyance. Kind at heart I can tell, but her form is not definite, it will leave no trace here among the void that surrounds this small paradise. Silence, laughter, words. They ebb and flow like the tide crashing on the beach of this island. Soon we emerge from this dark place, this cave of solitude. Into the night our forms travel, path lit in the darkness of it by pinpricks of light, small organisms of transformed material.
Darkness surrounds us for a brief moment, before I step across the threshold to a new place, foreign place. Within is a home of white, speckled with color and life. There are holes within this canvas, where my mind can peer into distant memories. A sanctum this is, a home of memories and love. I can feel it in the walls, the cold floor beneath my feet. Life was created here, the blessings it bestowed granted lovely emotions in the visitor. That is where the talent and strength must originate. Life has flowed through the visitor, and thus creation is simple to those callused hands. Hands that have given, taken, and held the weight of others up. Those hands have reached out to help, only to be lashed and scarred, but they try again, and again. I have felt the kindness and purity beneath every worn line. I can feel the pain, inflicted by another just beneath the surface. Why? I ask myself. How? How could anyone harm such a sanctum, injure such an entity?
We meld in the night, a writhing mass of coiled fabric and flesh. Inexperience is tossed aside, my mind guides me through the warm tunnel. The pounding beat of life reverberates in this soft place of solitude. The island boils away from us, and nothing else exists. Time flows from our bodies to pool around our forms. They coalesce into a multi-colored fountain emerging in the middle of this pooling lake of emotions and memories. It will forever stay a dot of pleasure amongst the sea of other such slices in time.
I travel through the rest of the island, through the memories. Yet I can never stay away for long. That one pool, that one oasis in the middle of the island weighs heavily on my mind. It bends the area around it, pulling my thoughts down into the depths of it’s own gravity well. I try to move away from it, I try to seek elsewhere. Yet for some reason my footsteps return to that bright white beach. If only to visit the entity that resides on it.
I know one thing.
I don’t want this island to be destroyed.
I want it to remain forever, and continue to grow and build.
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