A Familiar Stranger In Shadow And Smoke

I lie in the dark. The sleep takes hold. All else shifts away.

I remember smoke. I remember shadows.

I remember the journey to here.

I remember what I used to be.

In the dark of my dream I drift through the world and the body I am in is stripped down to bare skin. The darkness closes in on me, wrapping me like a blanket and kissing the skin which is too sensitive to ignore and it caresses me, waking me in the midst of my sleep until I realize I am dreaming but still find it in me to stretch and move.

I’ve never had agency in a dream before. I’ve never had control.

But now I stand in the dark and put my feet on hollow ground and I step forward, each movement echoing in ripples through eternity that is beyond me as the darkness forms shapes and shadows that I can barely begin to make out.

My hands touch my body and the touch is warm. There is no sense of fear here, no sense of uncertainty.

In the dark I am this woman and this woman is me.

And in the dark the smoke reaches out to me, slipping in from the corners of my vision and drifting into view but I don’t notice until it’s already on me and the tendrils of it are creeping around the edges of my skin and wrapping around me like gauze. I don’t notice until I can feel it holding me, drifting around me and draping itself over me. Wrapping me up in layer after layer of murky indistinctness until it surrounds me like a blossoming evening gown, all floating light and coverage.

I step forward and the world unveils itself. The dream takes form that is closer to real but there is still the distinct sense that it is all nothing but a sleeping illusion. Behind the items that appear in front of me there is the unerring sense that they are weightless. Facsimiles of a real structure that appear to all efforts at interrogation to be whole, but are only hollow in the end.

Reaching out I pluck one up and turn it in my hands. It is a matryoshka doll. Layers upon layers of intricate painting each done to be made up like a different version of a person and cut in the middle, the divide hidden by the craftwork but if you turn and you pull you reveal the layer below.

First a man, dressed in a suit and looking harried. Then a woman, younger than him and more uncertain. Then an old woman who looks like she has mystery in her eyes. Then an old man who is impossibly wise beyond his years. A little girl. A little boy. A skeleton hollow and then a baby newly born and then one and then the other and then another after that and I push and I pull and I twist and I cannot get to the end and they are all hollow but contain multitudes and they are indistinct and impossible to discern and I am panicking now and I am frantic with concern and my breathing is coming heavy and then she calls to me.

“So are you ever going to tire of that?”

I stop. I stop and I blink and I stare down at the version in my hand which is somehow, impossibly, just as large as it was when it began.

The figure is me.

It is a tiny reflection of the body I am in. It is Emily Ross rendered in paint and wood and every inch of her is recognizable to me. Every inch of the figure in my hands is every inch the body that I am in and I stare down into eyes that are open with a look I cannot understand, that I cannot place.

Open. So open. So very more open than I expected.

“You can try and you can try,” she curls her words from around the corner, “But it will always be the same my dear. It will always be new.

“So why don’t you put it down and have a seat. I expect you have many questions for me.”

I don’t know what to do so I do it. I place me on a shelf and I step forward and the tent forms around me and I am there and so is she.

Across the table. Across the desk. A multitude of forms of her.

Smiling, waiting patiently for me to take my seat.

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