(A recounting of a very vivid dream I had. Light on narrative but hopefully descriptive enough.)
Ahead there lay two rooms and my path ran through both of them. Unavoidable, a certainty if I wanted to go on. I could not go back, I would never go back. The innocuous door only helped remove the suspicions that had often hindered similar such journeys. Once inside drapes divided the low ceiling space and hampered my view of all in front of me. Fumbling along the fabric I found a break and brushed my way into the first sectioned area. It resembled something that once might have been a kitchen but had no cause to suggest it was still used for this function. It still has all the facilities but none looked like they have been in contact with anyone for years. Grime and grease caked the stove and pans which balanced, monolithic against the wall. The sink was filled with a putrid smelling water that invaded my senses almost blinding me to the litter of dead insects and rotting food on the floor. The curtain before me wafted and revealed the way to the next part of the room, I held my sleeve to my mouth and nose and hurriedly tried to step past the spills of indeterminable liquids and rotting vegetation that I assumed were once edible.
Getting out of the decay behind me was a short lived reprieve of my senses. The rest of the room seemed to be a living area but it was far from being a hospitable place. As my eyes scanned over the litter and waste strewn across the floor I saw her lying on the mattress. She was as she had always been and was still all I ever desired. There amidst this ruin she lay, reading in the way I had seen her for all those years, night after night under the dim light of late summer evenings. What had brought her here to this corpse of a place, her beauty surrounded by this festering filth. As I approached she looked up from her pages.
"How long has it been?" she breathed
I fumbled for a response but the shock of her returning to me in this place made my thoughts tangle as I tried to form them into understandable utterances. She stood up from the mattress and swept her way through the waste towards me. Remove the surroundings, remove the stench and I could be back with her, back to how it had always been. Her touch was just as I remembered and it drew me in, and we fell into it again. Each second made her burn in my eyes and mind with more intensity. I became lost again. As we laid down the room pulled me out of the fever. The state of degradation that the mattress was in, the filth splashed up the walls only seemed to increase the more she pulled me in. I tried to push it from my mind, tried to detach myself from everything outside of us. All I wanted for that moment was me and her alone in a void.
I watched her hand drag over me then sweep over the bed, damp stains formed in the tracks of her movements. It seemed to engulf me, taking all thoughts and contaminating them, rendering them diseased and tarred. The door was there, past the rot and decay. I clasped her hand and tried to take her with me but the room had its own grip on her. The more I pulled the more it melded with her, keeping her rooted to the bed, sticking her black hair to the walls. She screamed in torment as both I and the room each tried to claim her as our own. I let her go and I stepped backwards to the door, peace returned and anger left the room. When I turned back after opening the door she was as I had first seen her tranquil, reading by quiet light. I stepped forward and found myself bathed in white.
The white light eventually faded and the glistening tiles and metals perceivable. The room was pristine and dwarfed the place I came from. Every surface, every angle gleamed and shimmered. After the brief moments of awe ebbed away I focused on the door ahead. A straight path was all that separated me from my destination. Relieved at the simplicity of my journey I stepped my way to the other side listening carefully to the clinical footsteps as I walked. I had gone no further than ten strides before a noise undercut my own echoic sounds. It muttered low and indecipherable, mixed in and out with a rustling of a brush. The sounds bounced off the flat, hard walls which made its source hard to locate. Finally I looked behind to see a figure hunched over the floor, the floor I had just walked over. It scrubbed, muttering continually. I looked to see if I had brought through the filth from where I had been but all traces of it had stayed with the room as I left it, leaving me untarnished by its touch. As I looked closer I could see the vaguest mark of a footprint, a slight matting of the gloss tiled floor where I had stepped. Seeing the grievance this was clearly causing the man before me I stepped out of my shoes and continued in my bare feet across the immaculate floor.
I approached the man to reassure him that he would not need to follow me. By now he had nearly cleaned the remaining marks so I put my hand to his shoulder. I reeled at what I saw. My father's face as I had last seen it no less than five years before. He looked exactly as he had in the days shortly before his passing. Overwhelmed, first by shock then by the opportunities now handed to me I fell to my knees in front of him. I stammered words at him, trying not to become unintelligible with all that I had to tell him, all that I had achingly needed to share with him these last five years. But he pushed me aside as I hindered the last of his cleaning, still babbling undistinguishable words from his lips. His face was coloured, alive but his eyes just stared through all in front of them, dead and lifeless.
I looked down to his hands as they scoured the floor. They had removed that last piece of evidence that I had ever been there but they continued to scrape back and forth. As they moved I watched as the skin and flesh of the furious hands and fingers started to whither and age. More and more they crumbled, wasting away, leaving more and more of their essence on the tiles around. The rot was soon creeping up his arms and the clothes around his body became threadbare and worn. I grabbed at his shoulders urging him to stop, pleading him to give up this futile effort in the vain hope that it would halt whatever it was that was happening to him. His skin tore and came away from my grip and with this his head turned to me. Eyeless sockets and parched, weathered cheeks were all that remained and I fled, sliding and unbalanced on the frictionless floor. I reached the door and the muttering and scraping still reverberating around behind ushered me through, determined to never look back again.
And now I stand in the corridor, with nothing but an innocuous looking door and two rooms ahead. I cannot go back, so I decide to move on into the first room.
Ahead there lay two rooms and my path ran through both of them. Unavoidable, a certainty if I wanted to go on. I could not go back, I would never go back. The innocuous door only helped remove the suspicions that had often hindered similar such journeys. Once inside drapes divided the low ceiling space and hampered my view of all in front of me. Fumbling along the fabric I found a break and brushed my way into the first sectioned area. It resembled something that once might have been a kitchen but had no cause to suggest it was still used for this function. It still has all the facilities but none looked like they have been in contact with anyone for years. Grime and grease caked the stove and pans which balanced, monolithic against the wall. The sink was filled with a putrid smelling water that invaded my senses almost blinding me to the litter of dead insects and rotting food on the floor. The curtain before me wafted and revealed the way to the next part of the room, I held my sleeve to my mouth and nose and hurriedly tried to step past the spills of indeterminable liquids and rotting vegetation that I assumed were once edible.
Getting out of the decay behind me was a short lived reprieve of my senses. The rest of the room seemed to be a living area but it was far from being a hospitable place. As my eyes scanned over the litter and waste strewn across the floor I saw her lying on the mattress. She was as she had always been and was still all I ever desired. There amidst this ruin she lay, reading in the way I had seen her for all those years, night after night under the dim light of late summer evenings. What had brought her here to this corpse of a place, her beauty surrounded by this festering filth. As I approached she looked up from her pages.
"How long has it been?" she breathed
I fumbled for a response but the shock of her returning to me in this place made my thoughts tangle as I tried to form them into understandable utterances. She stood up from the mattress and swept her way through the waste towards me. Remove the surroundings, remove the stench and I could be back with her, back to how it had always been. Her touch was just as I remembered and it drew me in, and we fell into it again. Each second made her burn in my eyes and mind with more intensity. I became lost again. As we laid down the room pulled me out of the fever. The state of degradation that the mattress was in, the filth splashed up the walls only seemed to increase the more she pulled me in. I tried to push it from my mind, tried to detach myself from everything outside of us. All I wanted for that moment was me and her alone in a void.
I watched her hand drag over me then sweep over the bed, damp stains formed in the tracks of her movements. It seemed to engulf me, taking all thoughts and contaminating them, rendering them diseased and tarred. The door was there, past the rot and decay. I clasped her hand and tried to take her with me but the room had its own grip on her. The more I pulled the more it melded with her, keeping her rooted to the bed, sticking her black hair to the walls. She screamed in torment as both I and the room each tried to claim her as our own. I let her go and I stepped backwards to the door, peace returned and anger left the room. When I turned back after opening the door she was as I had first seen her tranquil, reading by quiet light. I stepped forward and found myself bathed in white.
The white light eventually faded and the glistening tiles and metals perceivable. The room was pristine and dwarfed the place I came from. Every surface, every angle gleamed and shimmered. After the brief moments of awe ebbed away I focused on the door ahead. A straight path was all that separated me from my destination. Relieved at the simplicity of my journey I stepped my way to the other side listening carefully to the clinical footsteps as I walked. I had gone no further than ten strides before a noise undercut my own echoic sounds. It muttered low and indecipherable, mixed in and out with a rustling of a brush. The sounds bounced off the flat, hard walls which made its source hard to locate. Finally I looked behind to see a figure hunched over the floor, the floor I had just walked over. It scrubbed, muttering continually. I looked to see if I had brought through the filth from where I had been but all traces of it had stayed with the room as I left it, leaving me untarnished by its touch. As I looked closer I could see the vaguest mark of a footprint, a slight matting of the gloss tiled floor where I had stepped. Seeing the grievance this was clearly causing the man before me I stepped out of my shoes and continued in my bare feet across the immaculate floor.
I approached the man to reassure him that he would not need to follow me. By now he had nearly cleaned the remaining marks so I put my hand to his shoulder. I reeled at what I saw. My father's face as I had last seen it no less than five years before. He looked exactly as he had in the days shortly before his passing. Overwhelmed, first by shock then by the opportunities now handed to me I fell to my knees in front of him. I stammered words at him, trying not to become unintelligible with all that I had to tell him, all that I had achingly needed to share with him these last five years. But he pushed me aside as I hindered the last of his cleaning, still babbling undistinguishable words from his lips. His face was coloured, alive but his eyes just stared through all in front of them, dead and lifeless.
I looked down to his hands as they scoured the floor. They had removed that last piece of evidence that I had ever been there but they continued to scrape back and forth. As they moved I watched as the skin and flesh of the furious hands and fingers started to whither and age. More and more they crumbled, wasting away, leaving more and more of their essence on the tiles around. The rot was soon creeping up his arms and the clothes around his body became threadbare and worn. I grabbed at his shoulders urging him to stop, pleading him to give up this futile effort in the vain hope that it would halt whatever it was that was happening to him. His skin tore and came away from my grip and with this his head turned to me. Eyeless sockets and parched, weathered cheeks were all that remained and I fled, sliding and unbalanced on the frictionless floor. I reached the door and the muttering and scraping still reverberating around behind ushered me through, determined to never look back again.
And now I stand in the corridor, with nothing but an innocuous looking door and two rooms ahead. I cannot go back, so I decide to move on into the first room.
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