When the past comes as risen rock and the future as ocean expanse, we leave our ledge, moving onward.
In my dream I went to bed and awoke to find angry people standing around me, accusing me of being in the wrong place. No matter what I said they got worse and started to call me names, accusing me in an apparently random fashion. I left, yet as I passed the doorway into the corridor a woman followed me and punched me hard in the rib cage. Later a friend came, an associate of the angry people, and placed a black bandage around my arm. On my right side my skin was split open from sole to jugular - and upon the site of the punch was a septic wound. Then the friend left. I awoke from the dream, opening my eyes into the soft light of a new day. The dream was of my past, of the friends that piled hurt on hurt, who landed punches and split me open when I needed a safe place to sleep and rest - to find sanctuary. Yet the brain will only show us these things when we are ready to see them, and so I know I have healed completely. I am ready for whatever is next. I'm moving on.
I close my eyes and see a pale shadow in the middle of the darkness. The shadow slowly morphs into a carnation, a dirty and dim version as if half its pixels have been extracted. It changes again. Soon it is the head of a person, as if they were a cadaver upon a steel tray, ready for the mortician to close up. Then it goes away, completing that dark space to nothing at all. I ask myself where the warmth is, the future I should move into, and I feel the hands of my lover upon my shoulders, warm and soft. He is separate from my past, external to the pain and harm, existing in a good space I need to turn into. I'm moving on. Finally.