Re-emergence

The tunnel is cold and dark and close around you, and crazy thoughts fill your head. What are you doing here? No, really, what? The things you've seen, these past days, the things you've heard and suffered, none of it makes any sense. It races around and around, as you huddle under the rough blanket trying to shut out the night breezes and the earthy chill that gnaws into you from beneath. Fear flutters at your skin like the distant song of the low life, and you are just thinking how impossible it is that you'll ever get to sleep, when you do.

In the dream, you are not alone. When you see him you know you are dreaming; the loss is so much a part of you now that even in the depths of sleep it never lets go. But you try, just for a few moments of solace, to push it away, to surrender to fantasy, to dream. He smiles at you, and takes you in his arms, and his touch is warm and dry, and for a little while the icy waters recede. He plants a little kiss on your forehead, just as he always used to, and then pulls away.

The room is small and mean, lit by a guttering oil lamp and the last embers cracking in the grate. There is a rough wooden table with stubby benches on either side, and he bids you sit. You sense some solemn ritual being observed, and neither of you speaks as he fetches a black iron pot from the fire and ladles soup into two earthenware bowls. He takes a seat facing you, and his expression is so tender it breaks your heart. You eat a couple of mouthfuls each, holding one another's gaze.

There is so much you want to say, but somehow it's up to him to break the silence.

"Hello, Alex."

"Oh, baby." You aren't crying yet, but you can feel your eyelids prickle. "Jesus, baby, I've missed you so much."

"I know. I'm sorry." Still smiling, still tender. Looking at him you realise how many details you've forgotten of his appearance and manner and the sound of his voice. You clung on so tight, but still they faded and left you. Just like him. "I've been waiting for you. I never expected it to be so long. It seemed... I don't know, it all seemed so simple at the time."

You want to say: "Simple? Simple? You drowned yourself in the fucking Thames! Jesus, how simple could it possibly be? What on Earth did you expect?" But those aren't the words that come out.

"Is this it, then, baby? Are you back? Is it all over?" You know the answer, of course, from the sadness of his expression, but you have to ask. "Are you back, now?"

He just hands you a bundle of musty cloth, a coat or cloak of some kind. "You'd better wrap up, it's cold outside."

"Then why go? Why go outside? Can't we just stay here, where it's warm? Can't we just be together for a little while?"

"I have to show you something."

So you put on the cloak, pulling it tightly around your own clothes, and follow him out.

He's right about the cold. Sleet drives hard against the bleak moorland and a cruel wind tears through every fold of the cloak to nip and bite at your shivering flesh. Your eyes are stinging, your lips numb, every breath burns. You lose sight of him for a moment, and start to panic, but he's there, up ahead, still up ahead, beckoning.

There are tents pitched haphazardly around, and horses tethered, and bundles of wood. You weave slowly across the hillside, without hope or purpose, just trying to keep up. Cold seeps into you like a long lost love beneath the lowering clouds.

There is light on the horizon, which you vaguely imagine as sunrise though it could as easily be the burning of a sacked town beyond. You find yourself looking that way as a horseman rears up against the livid sky, and the moment stretches into hours. His sword whirls, and the antlers jut proudly from his forehead, penetrating the heavens. His howl echoes across the landscape.

Where the fuck is this, anyway?

"Look."

It is so little of a cave as to be barely there at all, just a tiny depression in the hillside, just a space almost sheltered from the merciless wind. Someone lies slumped at its deepest point -- still not deep -- slumped and bleeding, wounded, dying, perhaps already dead. Someone else is weeping, someone you recognize, tears streaming down her face.

They are not your concern.

"Look. This is why you're here."

You look, but you don't know what you're looking for. It's cold, it's dark, it's wet. The darkness in the sky is nothing to the darkness in your heart. What are you supposed to be seeing?

"Look, Alex, look. Please. You have to see."

"What? What am I supposed to see? Help me, baby, please, I don't know what I'm doing here. I can't see anything. I can't see anything but you."

"There."

There.

A tiny flower has nudged its way up through the mud, and even in the dimness its yellow face is clear: five petals, sharp and pointy. In the midst of all this, it seems absurdly beautiful.

He leans down and plucks it. Presses it into your hand.

"We will always be here. This place, it never changes. Everything changes around it, but this place never does. The axis of the world. Remember that. This is where you'll find me."

"Baby."

"Find me."

His arms are around you, now, and yours around him, but there is mud in his hair, and grit on his skin, and he is soaked through, cold, so desperately cold. You try to kiss him but there is nothing but a mouthful of river water and it tastes like salt tears and snot as you wake up crying.

Crying and freezing and heartbroken, dragged back to that lowest point which you somehow, optimistically, thought you were long past.

Crying and freezing and clutching a tiny, yellow, five-pointed flower.
Posted by matt at April 22, 2005 07:57 PM