She lay on the bed, eyes half-closed, in that limbo, that no-man’s-land between sleep and wakefulness where you are free from earthly ties and unreachable dreams, from nightmares and the tedium of the minutiae of living that you stub your toe against every waking moment. These fleeting seconds, this is life, she thought absently, it was not really thought, just a few nebulous words falling together unconsciously in a random Brownian motion and somehow making sense. These moments, the words glittered in neon light that was curiously not harsh and jarring to the nerves, these are mine.
Random thoughts, vague ideas, lack of misgivings, absence of planning, forgetfulness, extinction of to-do lists, lightness of self- one floats in limbo, floats between dying stars and an alarm clock gearing up to create the excruciating noise that marks the beginning of another merry day.
Far away, Zeus was sending down lightning and thunder clouds, Pan was watching the death of his farmlands, Hades was laughing, Persephone was bored, satyrs roamed in Dionysus’ court feasting on wretched love. It was a curious sight to her. She could see their flowing robes and bored faces and their death in their immortality and the eternal wakefulness that never left them and their loves and lusts and their quest for power and the torture of living on Olympus . She wondered if they saw her and envied her and desired her peace- five minutes a day perhaps, but it was peace.
Strange quests presented themselves to her, ideas of romance and adventure, of stories told by eagles who spy on unknown lands and unknown peoples and fly to realms of fantasy and speak of chimeras and heroes. She heard voices whispering seductively, like sirens who awakened desire. That was what they did, she realised suddenly. Sirens who sang to Odysseus and all the men who passed by those islands, spoke to them of possibilities, of another existence, of myths and fallacies all men want to believe in. They only spoke of the dreams; they only conjured up fatal fata morganas. They cannot alter reality, they can only sing their visions in sounds that the universe dreamed up when it was still young and adventurous, in notes that are resonant with the first sounds of breathing and laughing and dying. They only wanted others to see what they saw. But the men died because they wanted it. They wanted to possess and control and have and get and writhed in their discontent and withered in their helplessness. They died. And the sirens screamed with anguish at their death when no one was near because their threnodies were the saddest sounds on the earth. Their wails would break masts and inspire suicide, and yet they spoke and sang in single notes which are now lost in symphonies and sounds that are forgotten. The Siren’s Song.
Trilobites came, growing in their peripatetic abilities, dying as they should and huge reptiles and dinosaurs lived and man came and lived and everybody killed everybody else in the limbo. Twisted tales of murder and mayhem, rape and incest screaming through, glaring like headlights that shine right into your eyes, burnt her sensibilities to cinder.
Rosemary. Rosemary, for remembrance, the sunlight kissed her forehead and told her. Cloves, cinnamon, red chillies- mystic spells cast by exotic spices wove an odoriferous fabric of nothingness around her consciousness.
Light and dark, sun and stars, tides crashing, quasars and pulsars expanding the reaches of the universe, creating space as they flashed by emptiness- they all centred around her- worked their magic and their routines for her, lived for her, died for her, spoke to her, listened to her.
Journeys were imagined, through time and through space, cutting across realms of reality as we define it when conscious. She was a Sphinx, she was at Delphi , she was in Paris
She was infinity and she was zero.
Love and hope kissed hate and despair lovingly and tenderly like lovers fated to meet for a few moments before being separated again and wandering lonely. Platonic lust, placid anger, hateful love, despairing hope clinging to each other in an orgy, a catharsis of every emotion spewed by the collective consciousness of a populace, surrounded her with paradoxes that were clear and problems whose tangles fell apart as she gazed at them with limpid eyes.
The alarm went off.
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