Butterfly Dreams
Meditations: Drifting
© Ilah, 1999
into the web of eternity
slip the grains of time -I have never before realized how silent the night is. How utterly still and devoid of all of the sounds and bustle and countless things which we take for granted in the light of the day. In the night, as the world sleeps, one might stand within the cocoon of silence and truly come to believe that one's heart is the only one which beats within all the quiet lands of the world.
I owned this house, once.
Admittedly, it is not a large house. Nothing grand, nothing at all like the estates of my father. Yet it has been comfortable and more than sufficient for a single man and a bare handful of servants to care for it during my frequent travels. My home, my space, filled with momentos of things I have seen and touched, places I have been, my belongings and all I have, until now, held precious.
How utterly hollow it all seems now, and yet... and yet some part of me cares for it still.
My fingertips brush across the crackling surface of papyri, over wax tablets where my hastily jotted and much erased notes are dug with messy haste into their substance. Over the worn wood of the table with its ink stained surface, where I have sat so many other nights beneath the light of candle and smoky lamp, heedless of the decline of day as the words race from mind to fingertip and out, through pen, to the sheets beneath. Never a thought I gave to the table itself and yet now I find so much merely in the touch of it - the nub of the grain, and there, a crack, tracing out to the nick in the corner where it had been struck against the doorframe when it was first moved into the room. The slick feel of dried ink, where it has obscured the grain of the wood. A hundred memories, a thousand sensations, all in the touch of a fingertip.
each grain a crystal note...
each note a haunted song...So many sensations from so many things, until I know the effort to disregard them, to appear as I once was, has left a crease between my brows and a tightness to my mouth that only increased their exclamations over my health when I appeared upon the doorstep early in the dusk hours of the night before. And what an uproar! To be reduced to pounding my fist upon the door of my own home until my man came running, and then one might have thought the very world had ended for the cry and wailing that arose when they beheld me there, unwashed, in dirt streaked foreign clothes. So much bustle, the candle lights bright in my eyes, their voices too loud and too harsh upon my ears. Exclamations of surprise, of dismay, of joy. I had been gone so long this time, where had I been, what had befallen me? So thin and so pale - was I ill? So many fell ill in the outer provinces. A physician should be called, a bath and a meal for the master, clean clothes and all of the joyous civilized things that I had been without for too long.
I had been overwhelmed and reeling... and saddened. I wasn't sure what I had hoped, coming home. I must go, I already knew that, with my maker's voice ringing through my fretful daytime dreams to spur me on. But I could not do it in the vagabond state I was in, and why not return home? Where all of my worldly possessions were, where I might find all of the things I needed and then set out again in the manner in which I was accustomed. It seemed so simple but I had never stopped to think of what 'home' might now mean.
Walking into this house I had discovered myself a stranger in another man's home.
I let the papyri fall from my fingers, step away from the table. All of my work, all of my writing... what mattered it now? I had taken the best of it, bundled it up and sent it along to those of my acquaintances who might make use of them. I had dismissed the servants, every last one - written them such letters as would see them to easily finding another position and explained, haltingly, that my health no longer allowed me to keep their services, or the home, or even to stay in the city. Tomorrow they would come to collect the things within the house, to sell them all and the house itself. All of my things, all of the memories... gone. Part of another life, one I no longer have a part in.
I might make another life. A new start, a clean slate, begun anew without any of the encumbrance of this former life. In a way I look forward to it, for life flows through my veins as it has not done in years and all of the unknown eternity stretches before me like countless sand beneath my feet. Yet at the same time it saddens me to let go of all I have known and loved.
ringing soft within
the hallowed halls of memoryThe low chair creaks softly as I lower myself to it, a sound I have grown accustomed to over the years. The latrunculi board remains as I had left it before my last journey, the game set upon it a puzzle I had turned my mind to solving whenever the mood struck me. To look at it now is to look at it through new eyes - in an instant I have the answer that had eluded me for so long and reach out to slide one of the polished glass pieces across the inlaid surface. Victory in four moves, the eagle captured, the legion in chaos. Simple, elegant, and new.
Yet no matter how many times I repeat it, a part of me mourns what is lost. Yes, it is a grand thing to be able to look at it and see it anew - but what of all of the pleasant hours spent studying, first from one angle then another, testing each possible move within my mind's eye before ever reaching for a piece? Shall I never do so again? Shall I launch myself, adrift within this new life, no longer even to enjoy the past times I once found pleasure in?
Such simple things to bring it to rest within my heart. When the servants would have brought food I could not bear it; I made them take it away. The smell of the things - all dishes I had once enjoyed - were unchanged and yet impossibly different. I knew the smell for what it was, roasted fowl; yet it was heavy and cloying as it had never been before, until the smell alone brought gorge to my throat. Even the fruits were impossible, though the sharp freshness of their smell was pleasant. I had taken one up in my hand and split the skin with the blade of a small knife. The scent was ecstasy, a treat of the sense, but I could not even bring the juice soaked blade to my lips. Such things were no longer for me. Never again to taste of food or wine, to feel the warmth of sun, to see the blue of the sky. Never again to live a life as other men.
to soothe the spinner at her loom
to troubled restless sleep.My hands tremble as I blink back the burning warmth of tears. Why am I mourning this death when all of a new life is mine for the taking? Yet a man should not go to his death unmourned and I have neither wife nor child to bewail my passing. No family to care and none shall take offerings to the temple to mark this loss. The tears fall, splashing hot against my skin, dropping with pale red stained dashes against the pale stone of the latrunculi board.
Even my tears are no longer my own. I brush them away and as I sit, drifting, upon the silence of the night I mourn the loss of the man that I was and wonder what life, of the myriad glittering threads spread before me, shall become the web of my future.