Palatial Relations

Dream: I'm half-demon, and you're half-angel. A long voyage lands us in an old cosmic safehouse, together with a brood of crossbreed friends and fiends. We are staying the night, awaiting the arrival of our savior who will lead us to the next step of our voyage. The night is windy and the pasttimes of our companions bore me, so I decide to go for a walk. Maybe the night air will clear my head, help me think, help me figure out what I'm doing here. You tell me to be careful; I wave goodbye as I walk out the door. I draw my wings around me to keep the wind away; I have wings, sometimes. Just as I have horns. When the cosmic tradewinds blow around me, my visage changes, and sometimes the full demon side can be seen.

I walk away from the house, down the road, that road that only leads AWAY. The way back is always longer than the way AWAY. The night runs around me like watercolors in the rain. Gradually, the landscape changes, and I find myself in a foreign place. It's a festival, a themepark for the damned, a literal Freak show. Like so many of our destinations, there is only IN and no way out. I am forced through it, bombarded by sights and sounds and feelings. I browse a gypsy woman's wares; she urges me to feel the cloths. The strangeness keeps coming, and to the outsider, the Other, maybe it would not be so strange. It is normal, people selling things and other people, people performing terrific feats, people people people. It is the humanity of the place that terrifies me, and all I can think about is how to escape, how to get away. I am no closer to understanding what I'm doing here, with you, but I know that I don't want to be HERE in the world that confounds me. I am frantic now, straining against the neverending current of bodies. A fortune teller grabs me with her eyes. She is large, larger than the damned people, more real to me. She shouts at me, fortunes, knowledge, and as I hear her words they are taken away from me by a greater force. She is shouting silence and ignorance at me, and I am locked there by her gaze. The river of bodies breaks me away, and I escape the festival at last, running and running. But I cannot escape the fortune teller's invisible words.

I come home, and it seems like Home now, the safehouse, and the hoard of cosmic bastards that I call a family. You were worried, and you welcome me back. You want to know what happened, and I try to explain, but all you do is stare at me with that worried look, even when my back is turned, even when you think I can't see. Time flies by like a river, flows by like a bird.

For a second, I am outside myself. I am Other, the great observer that IS. I can see now why you are worried, why things are different. I am not myself anymore. I am silent, I stop and listen to things you can't hear, and I stop to watch the things you can't see. Something has made me tragically different, and the space between us can not be bridged. It breaks my heart to watch us float away. It is ironic in the deepest sense that it is not the massive racial differences of our birth that have split us, but the simpler issue of Life and the act of living it.

My heart breaks, and the pieces fly away on the cosmic tradewinds.