The Land of Memories

I had the dream again last night. The dream that haunts my waking hours. I am in my hometown and it is dusk, the sun has just set. There is a carnival in town and a parade is slowly approaching. I can hear the sharp, metallic sounds of the calliope unwinding in the distance, slowly unraveling, unstitching itself at its seams. Strange souls singing songs of sadness and light, changing the structure of the very air surrounding me. I’m standing in the old narrow alley off main street.

It is a slithering, snaking thing, coiling into strange spirals, then back out again, darkly beautiful in its neoclassical brick architecture. Pale and protruding carved rock arches illuminate in the fading light above the crumbling boarded up windows of the abandoned stores that thrived here once upon a time, dropping bits and pieces on the patterned, wet brick street below. Rusted, ornate balconies romance the air around me with their mysteries, real and imagined, that once took place here.

Featherlite fingers touch my hair, my neck, my lips…. I throw my head back and howl with the drizzled moon. These are creatures of the dark that make our world livable, holding our structured memories together within the hollowness of seashells and empty glass jars swallowed up in towering, dismal landfills. And once you discover this alternate reality, your view of the solid world is forever changed. As the garish carnival procession approaches, it begins to dissolve into the mist around me. The monstrous midnight black horses rear on their emerald hoofs, pearly manes flying as they leap for the stars, pulling the ornately painted wagons up with them.

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The sounds of the calliope fade into a distant flash of lightning and thunder, erupting into tiny indigo flames while sparking and popping sounds fill the shimmering night air. Gone.

The singsong of their eerie chants linger in the mist for awhile, leaving behind the spirits of this place that joined them, saving my holy memories for aeons everlasting. Sometimes I wonder if my dreams are memories of things that never really happened, Or things that happened in a different dimension, in a different world, in a different time, in a different place, all at once. Things I longed for as a strange child in a world I never felt at home in. My mother always told me, “Anything is possible in this old world.” I believed her, more than she will ever know. I once read that the memory of things that never really happened are the strongest memories we possess, and I think this may be true. Once remembered, real or not, they are alive… we give them life through our thoughts, living breathing entities floating through the Cosmic Mind forevermore. Some memories, like some places, are meant for passing through, not dwelling within. But, we dwell. And dwell. And dwell. Such a small crime, really.

Perhaps it isn’t a person that we loved, a thing that we loved, a place that we loved. Perhaps it is the impossible memory of something that never really was, that we truly long for. I mean, I often find myself longing for this macabre parade (among other things)… A parade that never really existed. What never really happened in your memories that you long for? Have you ever thought deeply on this? It’s a dark and stormy night. I sit on my mothers back porch in the bleak, cold winter air while she sleeps her troubled sleep, watching the concentric circles form and expand around the lone street light in the distance.

The mist softly expands into millions and millions of infinitesimal falling stars raining down. Raining down starshine, raining down moonshine, sparkling like shattered glass, then bursting like roman candles into delicate flowers blooming and blooming and blooming… then shooting back up into the cosmos, but only if I stare without blinking for an eternity. If I blink, they disappear and I must start all over. The earth tips, spilling her oceans over her mountainous sides into… Nowhere. Purple and indigo waters form jeweled lakes drifting through space, swallowing entire worlds, lonely water islands that are older than we can know, ruby castles with gold gilded spires rise up with their own legends, water prayers for the stars and the tides circling the universe. Regardless of what we think, regardless of what we believe, regardless of what we judge, We are unknowable, even to ourselves. True Story ~The Ethereal Earthling~