Radiant light engulfed my vision, the sensation almost like staring into the sun. A kaleidoscope of opalescent memories shone like a strange dream. Every fibre of my being felt strange and ethereal, my spirit torn from my body, hijacked and stolen into a world of understanding beyond access to mortals. As images of thousands of worlds and lives flowed before me like an ocean of recollection, I reached out, seemingly attuned to a singular droplet of life amidst a vast sea of vigour, and as I clutched it - a realm of apparitions formed around me, reconstructing the life that I had caught within my hands.
A young girl played in her backyard with her father, as he painted a beautiful landscape, his face blurred and obscured by the passage of time. The scent of dew upon the blades of grass filled her nostrils. As she plucked a dandelion from the field, she blew against it - casting its seeds to the wind, to drift through the pale blue skies to some distant garden. I could feel the thought pass through her head, her childhood wish: "I wish mum would join us here". Her mother never joined them; she couldn't join them from her grave. As the memory passed, the apparition faded to mist.
Another world formed, as her father handed the young girl a paintbrush - trying to teach her about his world and the world she was named for: Andy. She didn't care much for it. As she cast the paintbrush aside, she stormed out of the room in tantrumous1Akin to a tantrum. Not an actual word in any dictionary sense, but I think it works and I like it rage. She had no desire for art; she'd rather stand in nature than stare at it through a canvas. She wanted to play in the garden and the park, to look around, to stare into the rabbit warrens and to watch the grey squirrels scurry through the gaps in the old wood fence. She wanted to be like the rabbits. When the world became too hard, they always had a warren to return to.
As the memory faded once more, a new one took its place - as she packed her schoolbag and headed off to her first day of class. Hundreds of empty faces lined the corridors, unimportant to her. As she arrived in the class, a faceless teacher stared down at her - told her off for something that she couldn't quite remember. The content of her words had faded into irrelevance, like the faces of her peers and of her teacher.
A quotidian world of scholastic underachievement flitted past: parent teacher interviews, report cards, and classes passing by with little more but a persistent sense of disappointment. Amid a world of underachievement, a small poetry book sat at her bedside. Unlike many of the lost faces and memories, the stanzas were recalled in vivid detail.
I drift apathetically,
Searching in vain,
Hoping,
Seeking,
That someone who will appreciate me for being me,
Instead of the me that they want to see,
I wasn't quite sure if it was good poetry or bad poetry. To me, it was just the musings of some young girl who had a notebook and a dream, but to her - it was special enough that she could recall each world verbatim. In her mind though, the poetry was bad enough that she was ashamed to share it, but within herself - she clung onto the memory of it.
Drifting through life, she begun to lament her father foisting his dreams onto her shoulders, the metaphorical weight encumbering her with the hell of expectation. Slowly making her way through high-school, falling farther behind as she desperately attempted to keep any semblance of her life together, of her dreams together, a pallid face drawn with malcontent stood out from the crowds as clear as day.
An abstract darkness lingered around his presence, as if her subconscious memory - even now, was trying to dissuade her from the path she'd already taken. She didn't listen to that future judgement, not from the world of the past. Getting to know him, talking to him, getting lost in his world with him - it was a world of self-satisfaction that she didn't quite understand. As she fell down into the depths with him, she began to fall apart too.
His fatal arms,
They tear me apart,
Rebuilding me in his image,
Going off to college, the weight of expectation began to take its toll, and with her life poisoned by a toxic cocktail of her own creation - she begun to lose her grip on the world. Moving from home, trying to make something of herself, yet spending six years as a bartender in a horrid an oppressive hovel - she fell into his arms once more. This time he was going to be different, she told herself. He never was. Flurries of screaming matches and bouts of anger melded together, a horrid world of anguish and avarice, two broken people trying desperately to tear one another to pieces.
She missed her father's funeral as the fugue of that world enveloped her.
As she finally gathered the strength to leave her behind - she ran from that world with nothing but her family and the hope that she could remake herself. Returning home, having seen the world and the way it truly was, she tried to leave it behind - but the temptations of drink and grass are seldom abated. A vice grip upon her, the remnants of a life she'd tried to leave behind. The straight and narrow felt like an impossible tightrope to walk, the abyss below it bottomless in its depths. As the abyss threatened to engulf her, a genteel old man - her uncle - glowed with radiance as he extended his hand out to her. An opportunity to start anew. She stretched out her arm, and gripped it as tightly as she could. That was all she'd ever wanted.
Her life continued to unfurl before me, like a tapestry of memories, and as I looked into her memories and her very self - I began to weave an understanding of the woman she was.
