Stuck In The Middle With Her

The smoke burns as it envelops me and while it's not fire and brimstone like the preacher promised, it still makes me wonder what kind of hell awaits me.

The curtain that I pushed aside was made of lace, gentle and soft and smooth and almost sheer. I could see hints of the room from outside, but as I stepped in I noticed it must have been an illusion of some kind because the moment it closed behind me it was thick and heavy and enveloping, like it cut me off from the whole damn world.

I'm not just talking about the dark, though that is undoubtedly a part of it. The heavy curtain blocks out the lights of the fair and the lights of the city. It lays heavy against the ground, making it so that my eyes have to adjust to the candlelit half-darkness of this tent.

The sound is gone too. The barkers and the carnies and the crowds are deafened by the overwhelming quiet. The curtains isolate, making me feel like I am adrift in the semi-darkness of this space.

And I don't smell the familiar scent of popcorn, of sweat, of people and life. Instead I smell the sickly sweet scent of dried flowers and incense. It cloys at my nostrils and makes my eyes grow heavy as they stare around the space.

The tent is an exercise in contradiction. It is somehow occupying two states at once, both large and small and full and empty.

Everywhere I look there is something to see but as my eyes pass over it I'm not sure if it'll be there when I return to it. The world seems all made up in here, like it's forming only because I'm witnessing it and gone once I forget.

But for the moment it is a clutter of crystals, of heavy linens and velvets deep in rich color. It is incense burning on sticks, little pricks of red hovering and slowly letting off a languid snake of smoke that curls towards the ceiling. It is candles bare and flickering, their wax and their flames exposed, then in jars and everywhere else. It is everything but the answers I thought I came here to seek.

I reach out for them and I reach out for something to hold, suddenly feeling a sensation of dizziness rise up from somewhere within me. The firm and solid back of a chair appears under my hand and I pull it out, feeling it bump along the divoted ground beneath me as I scrape it out and fall into it.

The chair is leather, so worn and so used that the color has long since turned to a muted sort of indifference. When I fall into it the scent of all the lives that have sat in it before surrounds me and my eyes grow heavy. They close for only an instant, but in that instant I live it.

So many lives. So many different experiences. So many different times.

I am a knight astride a horse, the weight of my armor heavy on my body. I am the princess staring up at him, smiling at the fact I can make a man so hard and fierce still fluster like he’s never seen a pretty girl before.

I am a conqueror of the newest age, striding into boardrooms and pressing my hands into the wooden surface of the table as I look around it at a dozen faces who will eagerly do whatever it is I want them to. I am his secretary, teetering along behind him on heels and clutching a notepad to my chest and fighting a smile when others quail under his yoke because I know that tonight I'll be the one standing above him while he kneels and begs me for more and I will give him that only after he has earned it.

I am a man and then I am a woman. I am everyone that has ever been here and all of their lives are mine for one instant as I inhale in the chair, breathing deep of the experience and holding it in as long as I can before I let it loose.

When I breathe out it is gone. When I exhale I am me again and that is the most unsatisfying state that I can think to be.

"Interesting," I hear her say, her voice warm and welcoming but crackling like fire consuming old, dry wood, "I see that I have a visitor."

I open my eyes, and I beg without words for her to give me what I need.

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