Entry 4 <Date Illegible>

Sometimes I dream of flying. Bronze scales underneath me, broad wings that dip and swerve. I feel the dives, the steady lift, the lightning fast balancing act between wind, body, and ground. I can feel cold, ice licking across my face, paralyzing my hands making the leather feel non-existent. The rolling land below and clear, cold dome above me, curved hard, glittering in the darkness until I fall into it, so cold. Blues deep, like the morning before false dawn, purple-blue like twilight where all the color on the earth is sucked into the heavens, leaving shadowy shells behind. Blue-green like the last light of the sun reaching into the night, like the Grecian seas shading of colors back and back to the horizon reflected in the white-washed sand. I dream of light and color, vivid pictures with no sound, no taste, no smell, only color. I would drift. I would float away from thought and ridiculous duty until I could hear the music again. I would drift until I felt true emotion, not the sleepy grumblings of a waking dreamer. I would drift until I could know the face I wore before I was born, Until I could see truth. So isolates, as if I were all alone, but crowded. Babble, chat, speak just to know your voice still works, speak so that maybe someone will hear, someone will care. “Fix it, Ms. Make it all go away. Can’t you make everything ok?” Place. My place. My desire, the thing that ties me to the rules. “The ties that bind.” I would be the anchor, the anchor that wants to drift. The anchor that holds the world together and yet floats away on the smallest current. Ever-change as if by the sheer fact it exists, it binds. The world needs it, not necessarily what it was supposed to do. The broken hand. Useless? or more than what it was because it has no convention now. My name. This book is my name. The name that has no sound and no form. No wonder the ancient cultures believed in the power of names —keys to the deepest, shadowed souls. Am I shadowed? Dark. Darkness is not evil. Shadows can reveal as much trust as they conceal. “What grace has given me…” What do you see in the dim, dark corners of this world? What fears do we stuff down our own stomachs and lock away in our throats? Why are we taught to hate and forget these fears, these shadows? They can show new shape to old, familiar energies. Give new colors to a palate taken for granted and abused. Why do we bury them?