In Flames

Denise, Denise, and then there was Denise.  Cut my skin and the color of love shall flood the ocean of your moods.  Caress a jasmine rose and lend your touch to my heart in the palm of your hand.  My love is like a flower for you.  What dost thou sing, Denise?

I’m on the bus to school.  It’s a bright spring morning.  Birds are singing in the air, a chorus of chirps.  The chorus is to the birds as the radiance is to the sun.  I have never listened to the birds as cheerfully as I have on this fine day.  Their song is like a siren drifting through the morning air, allowing the day to be greeted by every inhabitant of the forest at the sounds of their warbling.  The trees dangle with dew and the soil smells of fresh moss.  Everything is ready to blaze, breed, and blossom under their music, all orchestrated by the rays of the April sun.  It is the best morning of my life.    

Nothing matters in the world but her.  As the bus rolls down the road towards her stop, I think about how the land would moan under the ice during the cold days of winter.  Winter, the wasteland of my heart: that was ages ago.  Now begins a new season and a new age.

Denise, there you are, idling with a friend at the bus stop.  You’re the glory of spring, the sprinkles on ice cream, a reflection of sunlight that shimmers on water, a lone lark singing in a valley of sparrows, a child dancing between businessmen on Broadway.  Look into the window, see who I am.  Don’t look away.  Don’t talk to fake friends about insubstantial things.  Now here she comes, walking down the aisle towards me.

Her face is an angel’s, her body is a crib of warmth.  Her hairs are golden ribbons, which hold twirling cilium that allure me to her from the ends of each of their strands.  Her skin is as soft as a peach’s; her eyes are like the exotic glare of a feline in heat, having coral-blue irises that dazzle like sapphires; her walk imitates the carelessness of a child’s; the very air around her makes my skin melt.  I am weak in the body, shaken by her beauty.  Yesterday I did not feel, today I can.

She sits down across from me on the bus.  I’m too nervous to say anything and decide to mind my own business.  I take in the aromas of perfume cast off by her pink sweater, a sweater cupping small but ripe breasts beneath it.  Her eyes, like fire, mirror my lust and desire.  At the perfect moment, I steal a glance in her direction and see something anyone else would have been ashamed of seeing.  My hormones light up like a bonfire and my body seems to swell up in flames.  There it is, the whiteness betwixt the creamy thighs of her canyon, deep and undulating; a river from which the seeds of life could spring.

It’s not only her body I want, I want to know her too.  I just don’t know where to start, and I think about that moment all day long.  I think about the dream too, and what it could mean.  An angel had spoken to me through the caverns of the Earth.  She has washed me, and now I am clean.  What little sense of purpose I have in life has diminished with a stroke of passion.  I want nothing more in this entire world than to be with her.  What I feel for this girl is special and indescribable.  I am not in lust, I am not in love; I am in flames.

The Dream

Last night I had the most profound dream of my life.  I was lost inside a labyrinth, deep in the Earth.  Someone was calling my name.  It was a girl’s voice, soft and luxurious, like the ringing of a bell.  It wasn’t the voice of anyone I knew.  There was a desperation in it I’d never heard before.  Since it was my name she was calling, I wondered if I was responsible for her being lost.  She kept calling me, so I kept going forth, drawn to her voice like a moth to a flame.  From out of the deep and darkest chasm of the Earth, it felt like an angel was calling me, and I needed to be cleaned.  

I came to a path that went downward and curved around, the way a spiral stairway does.  The ground was white, and the walls were crystal blue.  Down and down I went, into the sub-cerebral cavern of my mind.  The further down I went, the colder it became and the harder it was to breathe.

“Chrisssss”, came the voice again.
        I became conscious of dreaming, as sometimes will happen in such lucid dreams.  But I continued on like I wasn’t.  Dreams are more real than people give them credit for.  If you can become conscious in a dream, does that mean the real world is also an unconscious creation?

Soon the right side of the path dropped off into complete darkness.  Up ahead it curved around the jagged edge of a cliff.  I thought of throwing myself into the abyss and ending the dream, but she was still calling me, and I had to save her.  On I went.

Mr. Booth, a former teacher, was suddenly in front of me, whispering, Go on, she’s there waiting for you.  She’s been waiting a very long time.  You abandoned her.  He pointed down an incline towards what appeared to be a snowy cave, then drifted off into the shadows.   I walked down, step by step.  Her sobs echoed off the walls of the cave, reaching every corner of my mind.  The echoes intersected one another with great bursts of spiritual tears that were raining down inside my head.

I entered the cave.  Its walls and floor were transparent sheets of ice.  As I slid myself over them, I became aware of a great void below me.  Looking down, I could see through the transparent ice, into nothingness.  Looking up I could see through it as well, a complete transparency.  There was no sun up there: only the recesses of my mind, which seemed eternal.  

I rounded a boulder and walked upon a rocky, snow-packed surface.  It was freezing here, and I breathed out vapor.  Then I heard behind me that same crying, as clear as the crystal surrounding me.  I’d finally found her.  As I turned around to look at her, my eyes grew wide, and my heart went racing.  The girl was... Denise?  She looked sad, but beautiful at the same time.  Her sobs thickened and she started crying at a more rapid pace.  It seemed like the more she cried, the colder it got. 

Her tears turned into icicles that fell from her eyes.  They layered on top of one another like clouds of smoke rising from a volcano.  Soon there was nothing but ice, and a sharp siren of panic rose from the abyss below.   The ice exploded around me, into a million shards of crystal.  I wanted to save her, but I couldn’t.  Before I could make a move, I awoke to the real world, a world that had thrown me away.   I righted myself out of bed, muttering one single name...

“Denise?”