The woman you meet in the Dream Realm is certainly not the woman you are on Earth; delirium is an old friend I never see while I am awake, and lately, I am awake but never dreaming. In my adolescence, I foresaw a shadow cast by the moon’s sinister smile, and I cupped it in my palms to extrapolate a fire of all-encompassing clarity; but must the woman find clarity when womanhood is deemed a certain kind of madness?
When I was young, not yet surpassing the years of my boyhood, I read stories that struck the lilies in my mind with bluely peculiar hues; the most dangerous implication was that these lilies grew. Their petals did not cease to grace the barriers of my cerebrum — and I knew the moon would keep smiling down on me — and by the last violent August, I realized that my servitude was for all realms of the spiritual plane. If you waited for the right time of the night (and you were fast asleep), you could see a fountain where the nightjars mingle and whisper secrets about God. To discover these proverbs, I knew I needed to pass the threshold that rejects magic as a supernatural condition. I was in desperate need of a Wonderland.
As my adolescence preceded me, I examined my soul as a product of the garden I nurtured here on Earth. The mind is certainly a curious product of God because inside of it you cannot distinguish the difference between Eden and Wonderland. I understand that in Eden when you cry you do not make a sea of tears, and the remedy for these tears is not to race away from the lagoon that is your heart. By Earth’s law, sensitivity grounds you in the roots that birthed you. In dreams, you can reach the heavens.
The strangest revelation in Wonderland was found when I peeked through the garden hedges, I heard no song of a nightjar. A sight I remembered, however, was the etching of words on a stone wall: MADNESS IS A CONDITION OF YOUR WOMAN. Considering the time of night, I assumed I might have misread the message on the stone wall. Instead of rubbing my eyes from the muck of exhaustion, I gazed up at the moon again — which only grinned at me tonight. Usually, I am confident in the ability of the moon to provide me with a solace that can only be felt by the motions of my occasional Earthly devotions, but in this world, the sensation of this consolation does not protect the Soul from the truth of the Earth’s cruel dictations. Even in Wonderland, you are approached with the truth that you cannot reach on Earth, and this makes me question if I have truly reached the heavens.
I channeled my vision once more into the crack of the hedge wall, and in an abrupt instant, the greenery diverged into a vast clearing — with a stark absence of polluted structures. Unsure if this was an indication of impending calamity, I chose to pinpoint where I felt the turmoil inside of my body: it was a deep moan in my abdomen, which made sense because I was quite behind on my daily devotions in the Earth Realm. The frame in front of me was subject to constant fluctuation, and it was only because my body submitted to cycles of constant and unprecedented change. On Earth, I flaunted a beauty that accessed the deep pride of my forefathers, but in this cool and empty realm, my body was a beautiful white rose that could be painted with any color I wished.
Back to Eden: I still cried, but I could not produce an ocean. Spiritual hunger is mythological. My body is subject to biological essentialism. Madness I do not know. I still read stories, but they do not reach the access points of the lilies brimming in my mind. The only lilies that I ever have the luxury of accessing are strictly material, a delicate sensation between my fingertips — whose conception involved the serenation of soulful tears, Earthly tears. Once the Earth discovered the daughters of my tears, She turned them to ash and ordered me back into the Dream Realm. She could not understand that in this ideation I could not sleep, for I was mourning my children; I urged Her to disclose the reason behind her cruelty, but the only answer She could muster was that my greatest Earthly transgression was mistaking the cruelness of the Earthly body for the clarity of the Earthly spirit.
Exhaustions do not precede you: they transfix you back to the truth. I was a white rose once again, with no desire to reach a hidden inventory of infinite color. Above the tranquil barrier between the sky and the horizon line floated the moon. Laughing. With each soft sonic shiver, the colors in the sky transformed gradually from a deep plum to a perfect indigo to a quiet lilac and then a subtle infantile blue. It was in the final phase that I could see the full face of the moon. Above the smile now was a tiny button nose bordered by two equally aquamarine eyes. The ground of these features was that perfect indigo, consumed my white rose body in previous successions of the amply cool dawn — shaped with a chin as sharp as her smile and as piercing as her feline ears:
I am cheerfully guided by Earth
Just as kind and just as cutting
I am a cat, yes – but I am Wise.
I coordinated with Earth before you returned,
and She told me of the lilies!
How curious…
Because when I smile down on you,
I greet the petals of roses!
I welted in my rose body, both an imposter and a stranger to my sorrow. And here now, this Great Cat was laughing at my delusions! With each jolt of tears that spawned in response to the Great Cat’s cackle, my height diminished, and I felt less and less like a lily. How terrible to realize that heaven was not heaven……for in that final time I gazed at the smile of the moon my body was met with an entire valley of lilies. I felt the pages of my book of devotions between the touch of my leaves. These were the lilies of my mind in their most natural form. I knew by the valley’s vastness that I was still in the Dream Realm, but in this season I did not seem to be the subject of mockery. Then I rediscovered the power of my wonder: Was it the laugh of the Great Cat that sprouted the lilies up from the soil of the empty valley in the Dream Realm, while in the Earthly Realm, it was my tears that conceived my daughters? My sadness is certainly curious, but God is certainly curiouser.
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