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Chapter 19

 Dead Wrong

PART I: Vexed

I watched a woman tonight. Her overall features gave me the impression she was in her mid 30:s. She was slender built, with long, straight platinum blond hair going in a strikingly concentrated nuance. As much as the brilliant gleam and glistening in her hair seized my attention the thing about her that caught my eye the most was her length. Not that she was extremely tall, over the average for a woman, yes, but not extreme in any way. But, she thought she was, she thought she was freakily tall. And indeed, she had been commented on for her length over the years. I wondered if maybe this was in part due to the colour of her hair, if perhaps it made her look longer, as if it drew attention to her height by highlighting how far her body reached above the ground.
         I was watching her from such a close range as was I floating around her, and yet the distance between us was like an impenetrable eternity. When the dream began the comments she'd been subjected to in regard to her length had grown like mould within her, by now its echoes had spread all over, akin invisible yet very real toxic threads winding every which way. Caught in this web of maddening torment and disdain she was convinced, completely and utterly convinced, she looked like an alien.
          When in public she tried to conceal her length by bending her knees and back, attempting this way to hide what she thought of as her detested characteristic features. Her endeavours weren't successful though, it only drew everyone's attention to the very thing about her she wanted not to be seen. Ironically this also, even if involuntarily, veiled everything else about her, all of her beauteous and remarkable gifts got shrouded behind the veil. Watching her like this made me ineffably sad. She was in fact an uncommonly beautiful woman with an uncommonly exquisite air about her. I wished she could see at least some of the things in herself that I saw.
          But the poisonous threads had worked their ways thoroughly in her mind and by now they'd totally blindfolded her vision; it was like she saw herself through a warping filter writhing the world unrecognizable and greying all the colours. Like was she living in a constant shadow towering over her head, a many-folded shadow falling from huge walls which carefully sealed off her different sides from one another, and, hence, from her eyes. Held in that iron grip of dread and desolation she needed Someone, Someone to help her tear the walls down.
          It hurt me immensely but I knew, I don't know how I could know this but in the dream I knew this meant she had to be broken down. That was the only way to bring her different sides back together, and, in so doing, creating a foundation upon which true life can flourish, along with an absolutely awe-striking spectrum of colours, since this time around her different sides will be braided and interlaced with one another in a whole new and vividly vibrant manner. Yes, a truly enrapturing richness of colours will be there for her to see, as the scales are washed from her eyes. In the dream this was as clear to me as is the fact that, if the sun can't reach through to sun-dependent life-forms, they can't grow and prosper, turning instead sickly white and, before having really began their lives, they wither on the ground. Therefore the walls around her had to be broken down, no matter how heartbreakingly hurtful this would be to her.
          But never fear! I know that the very same second her sun of life touches her again it will vaporise the malicious, misty veil and all that she is, and always was meant to be, will start moulding and take shape and thrive. And then, oh then!, something beautiful beyond imagination will come about! Yes, my friend, I know this to be so.

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When I came to her tonight the spinning demons had filled her with an implacable urge for vengeance. Not, however, and this is so telling for who she is, not her heart and soul, but the distorting yarns had completely tangled the level now in control of her being: the centre of her thought-system. This had steered her into a state of utter despair and desperation, and now she was on a mission to execute the ones that had oppressed her. She had already killed most of them, some by slicing their throats open, some by full decapitation. Her latest victim was a man around sixty or seventy years old.
          My knowledge about this was like the printed prehistory that sometimes opens the story in a film, only my background knowledge came from having been around her all her life.
           The dream begins with her walking up the stairs in a tenant building. She's heading for the apartment where her latest victim used to live. The reason for her returning there is to collect a pack of bills. The money bundle sits on one of the windows in the room immediately to the right when you've entered the apartment. This window is rather large, and separated into two sections, where the money is put in the left corner of the upper right section. I watch her climb the stairs to the forth or fifth or maybe seventh floor, I'm not really sure which.
          Once outside the murdered man's door she rings the bell. She knows no one will answer since she has killed the man who's home she now is about to re-enter, but she rings the bell anyway, because she can't just open the door in case some of the neighbours should see her. It would look suspicious, she'd figured, so she has to pretend as if she was just another visitor. To her utter surprise though, someone does answer the door. A youngish man, maybe in his mid-twenties, stands in the doorway.
          The very second he stands there before her she instinctively prepares herself for the look in his eyes she is convinced will appear when he sees her – a small yet so highly significant shift in a gaze going from being open to behold just anything, to seeing someone hideous: Seeing her. Only, this doesn't happen. The young man doesn't look at her like that, instead his eyes reveal seeing an unfamiliar, and pleasant, looking woman. Not as if he is attracted to her, it's just as if she appears to him as precisely that: unfamiliar and pleasant. This awakes a million contradictory thoughts and feelings in her, but the nucleus in them all boils down to one cohesion: A big sense of relief.
          She is astounded and bewildered, she just can't comprehend this. There she is, in all her length with bended knees and back and all, with her long shining platinum blond hair and incisive eyes. And he is young and quite good looking, so in her mind he should be able to see she is a freak, an alien, see it and letting her know he'd seen it. But he doesn't. She can tell he isn't just being polite, you know – holding back from letting it show. He simply does not perceive her like that. This puzzles her intensely.
          She figures this must be the son of the older man, her latest victim who's apartment she'd come to revisit. When she killed that man she didn't know he had a son, in fact, she didn't know anything about him except that he had agonized her. Finding out he had a son bothers her severely in itself. Finding out this son is unambiguously a non-judgemental and open minded person, and hence a quite singularly good-hearted young man, feels to her like had someone stabbed her deep into her stomach.
          At first she is surprised the young man is so calm, but then she reckons he hasn't seen his dead father yet, he must've gotten there only seconds before her. But she knows his murdered father is in the kitchen. She has placed him there herself, putting his dead body on a chair next to the kitchen table in a position as was he still alive. Yes, she knows the murdered father sits by the kitchen table, his body coloured in dead white and a big deep-red cut running all the way through his throat. His mouth is stiffened in a cry of death and his unseeing eyes wide open, staring into an endless nothingness. It is a sight screaming out to anyone who sees it this man is dead for real, and yet, he sits there, positioned as if he just wanted to rest for a while, you know, letting his mind wander freely, roam absently and carefree on trails not defined.
          She doesn't want for this innocent, amiable young man to ever see his father like this. She deeply and wholeheartedly regrets killing him. Not for the old man's sake, no, she would do it to him again in a heartbeat, but for his son. She feels terribly, horribly bad for what she's done to the son through his father, so for the son, and for the son alone, she would never do it again. The son shouldn't have to meet this horrific sight and ghastly understanding. He is innocent, he is good, he hasn't done anything to deserve this and yet, yet he will be the one to suffer. She has done to him the worst thing imaginable, not even knowing this was what she did. And now she regrets it from the very core of her being.
          She is going through all of these thoughts and motions in a lapse of time stretching no longer than an instant; they're torturing her, confusing her, hurting her tremendously. But none of them shows on the outside. Visually, what takes place is simply a brief meeting between a long, platinum blond woman and a young, nice looking man, standing on two sides of a threshold. She says she has come for the money his father has left for her in the window. She doesn't want the money, she never did, she just had to collect them somehow, and besides, now when she stands there she doesn't know what else to say. If someone had asked her why she went back for the money she wouldn't have been able to answer – she just doesn't know. The young man tells her she can go right ahead, he pushes the door open for her and let her in. She heads for the window where the money bundle is put, takes them and leave in as much of a hurry she can allow herself without revealing she wants to get out of there before the young man discovers his murdered father by the kitchen table. She knows she cannot handle that.

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I can see her new path so clearly, it is lying there, right before her, so very close now, but to her it is yet unreachable as it is being concealed in the many-shadowed forest of fear and denial; a phantom forest spun by demons from What Once Was. To reach her new path she has to truly enter this deep forest, walk straight into the dark dread of the wordless unknown – that place which she fears the most.
          I will hold her hand when she goes there, she won't know this but for brief moments she'll feel it and it'll give her the strength she needs to go on. Taking those first steps will be so scary to her, she'll be so immensely afraid it'll make her body tremble, but she will go there all the same. I know she will. And then, when she crosses the final threshold, I am going to be there, waiting for her. I can's say just how much I long for that moment to come! You see, that threshold marks the intersection where our souls will once again entwine for real. Oh, oh, oh happy day!

continues in Chapter Twenty...