bloodteethandflame

(Actually written 22 June 2012 in my personal [read: paper notebook] journal)

Once we arrived at the campsite, we were tired, but we didn’t lay down until very late in the evening.

So I was laying there, thinking about how devoutly I wished that sleep would come.

Then, I began thinking about how out of touch I felt with spiritual things.

I found myself wishing again, that I could talk to the gods in my dreams.

I wanted an explanation of sorts; I wanted something to explain as to whether or not…I was being noticed(?)

Something tense, sad, and dark was bubbling up within me, within my thoughts.

And so began a seemingly mundane dream, interspersed with wildly shifting images, shapes and faces, concepts and colors.  These then became rapidly cycling mental impressions and imagery of my siblings and parents, and I looked around to find myself sitting by myself at a Formica table, in a mostly empty diner.  What I saw around me seemed something out of Hemingway’s short story, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.

The atmosphere struck me as both peaceful and yet a little bit melancholy, as I was surrounded by muted voices from people with drawn, insomniac faces, lit under bright, flourescent lighting.

And then it came: Like a narrative voice-over in a movie scene, a young boy’s voice rang out clear in my head, loud and close to my ear, and he said:

Even though my Father doesn’t mind (doesn’t like?*) you talking to him, I think that you should know that…you have a spider on your face!

The boy’s voice sounded caught, breathless, as if the presence of the spider was a sudden and unexpected interruption, and he’d actually meant to tell me something else entirely; there was something meaningful that he’d come to explain…

But I suddenly awoke, my face tingling, to find myself swatting from my face an actual spider.

It was a little grey spider, with bright red points on its legs and back, and I’ve no doubt that it actually had been crawling on my face.

I watched as the spider skittered away over the rumpled sheets, disappear over the edge of the mattress, and unto the ground.

The spider was real.

And I am left wondering, now.

Who is the boy?  And more importantly, who is his father?

~~~

* The boy’s voice, though rather loud, seemed to swallow a word there, and I couldn’t tell if he said ‘mind’ or if he said ‘like.’

It bothers me, as that particular word in that sentence seems to be the most important word of all to have understood in order to understand the overall meaning of the sentence, in my opinion.

Part of me wants to believe that it was mind and not like, simply because, whomever it may be that the boy was referring to, it hurts my ego to think that “(his) Father” is bothered by my talking to him!

*sigh*