Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Qui

I awake from disturbing dreams in the silent half-light of my hotel room. Seventh floor. It's late afternoon outside the cracked window. Cool air blows in. Church bells ring softly in the distance. The sky is gradually melting into a pre-evening glow.

Outside, a faint ambient murmur suggests a gathering of sorts, a spooling of energy that will soon explode into light -- the crackling nightlife that unwinds into city's cobblestoned, spider-veined streets.

As I gaze blankly at the ceiling, my mind turns in the dissipating wake of sleep's alternate awareness. The dreams were about love. What made them disturbing is that they were wonderful.

In one of those dreams, a young blonde-haired girl enters my life. We are perhaps fifteen or sixteen. The tendrils of bittersweet, teenage infatuation are pulling at my heart as I stare at her. We're near a beach somewhere in southern California. I can smell the salt air. I am content simply to be there, to be in her presence.

Who is this girl? Is she Rome, or love itself? It's the same either way.

I know I will soon lose my grasp of it -- this dream, this place, this love. And in the transitional moment between sleep and reality I am blanketed by a creeping desolation: a sadness, both at my imminent loss and my powerlessness to prevent it.

I realize the mind is a catacombs. Filled with the dead and buried -- the dusty stacks of decaying memories. And my consciousness is the ever-present wanderer of that layered, subterranean landscape. But there is a deeper level yet, a dark, locked-off level, a place forbidden.

There is something powerful, something forgotten down there. I want to access it, but I can't. It is the story of true love.

It was a place I inhabited in my youth. What was once a place in the sun has since been paved over left to decompose underground. I can only visit now. And, as with all visitors to such places, I am left wondering if I will ever make it back.