I can only describe the dream as something that felt like death or what I imagine the end must truly feel like. Not merely a physical end, no, it was a cessation of both body and psyche. As I sit here alone in the dark, I am still gathering my thoughts. I know I will struggle to capture exactly what has transpired, but I have to try.
Have you ever felt the utter encapsulation of darkness? As a child in the dark, you are afraid because you cannot see; you are lost, with no sense of control. You do not know what is out there, and that fact alone scares you. As you grow older, you learn to walk through the dark unharmed. You know what it entails, what lies on the other side, you are prepared. But what happens when you are grown and you are still afraid? It is a strange irony. A child fears the curtain because they do not know what hides behind it. But an adult? An adult knows exactly what lies beyond the curtain. And because you know, because you understand, that alone scares you shitless. It terrifies you. You and I, our minds create this fear. We are scared because of what we know. If we knew nothing, the dark would simply be a blanket.
I knew this darkness. I was afraid. Maybe there is something that makes us naturally fear the dark, but this was different. This darkness gripped me by the reins, reduced me to a passenger. It tainted me, forced me to remember things I had desperately wanted to forget and finally, after dragging me through my own past, it delivered me to my place of judgment. A colosseum.
The colosseum was a hellscape of fire that raged through the night. The flames danced around me, curling in between my fingers. The darkness guided me with an unseen hand. Around us, the flames burst upward and glittered like embers. It was then, in this fiery colosseum of pain and destruction, that I remembered between the darkness and I, there was a woman. Through the shimmering heat, the woman who knelt before me found some hilarity in that even now, seemingly at the end of it all, she could wear a grin on her face. Even in this moment there was this unspoken stillness between us as the shadow watched us.
The unyielding raging world creatively bent around us, and at last I listened to the voice in my head, telling me to raise my weapon of judgement. It trembled in my grip, the dark barrel was but a narrow shadow cutting through the fire's furious glow. Despite my best efforts my hands shook. My hands shook so violently my weapon itself defied me. It too, rattled with the weight of my choice. Even then, the woman still knelt before me, she remained still before me. Her bowed form caught in the restless light as if waiting for the fire, or the shadow to decide her fate instead of me.
My breath hitched. A tear slipped free, then another, and another... but all vanished against the scorched air. My humanity peered through and my lips parted the words ever so fragile.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
In that instance, the words weakened me. It seemed as though my own voice betrayed me.
But then the shadow took my hands, reminded me why it brought me to this colosseum of pain and why I was afraid of the darkness that surrounded me. It was then I felt a shift somewhere inside me. A resolve, knowing that it had to be done. My face hardened and it smoothed into a mask that no longer carried sorrow, only calm.
I no longer trembled. It ceased.
My hand was steady.
The shadow, with its flames leaned close, whispered something only I could hear. The fire's shadows coiled around my shoulders, and I swore the man who had been weeping was gone and what had remained was a figure that was only sharp and merciless.
A silhouette of a supposed murderer, seemingly forged in a blaze.
The gun fired.
It tore through me and it echoed throughout walls of flame as though the world itself recoiled. It was such a violent tremor that sent sparks scattering like frightened birds.
It's here, I think the shadow, with its fire, answered me.
It bent against my rage. My red blood mixed with the flame, and it surged all over, furiously, while blue flared low at the flames roots. For an instant the flames moved with the shot. It was as though the bullet's fury had mixed with the flame, almost celebratory.
A fiery, blood red kill.
The echo lingered, long after the trigger had stilled, humming in the bones of the burning world.
But nothing can still a broken heart.
A terrible dream.
No,
a terrible nightmare.