Daymares

Fragmented images lay like tattered pictures just beyond my fingertips.  I am propped here on my pillows like a broken doll.  My china face, porcelain bone, cupped by its mound of featherless support.  The elongated neck that connects me to the rest of my frame seems like a spare cable.  I know it is there, but I cannot move it of my own accord.  I know this because I have tried.  The weight at the tip of my skull is too heavy and the useless bag that heaves breath up and down does not cooperate either.

My fingers tipple and wiggle, stretching toward those images.  I am certain that if I can piece those fragments together I too can become whole.  Frustrated, I allow myself to drift back to watching the endless swish of the blades of the ceiling fan.  White against white they make almost no shadow at this time of day.  The heat is oppressive and their effort to move the air seems lackluster.  It is as if they do not have the will to try.  I do not blame them.  I have lost the will to try as well. 

I know that as the sun moves the shadows will return.  The heat will lessen and this will seem a blessing.  But like so many blessings it will be one I will have to pay for dearly.  I will pay for it with the shadows that it brings.  The white blades will extend their arms and begin to cut like knives through the room.  Their shadows sharpened and extended.  The points directed at me.  Eventually the time will come when they are ripened enough to reach me, to slice me, to spill more of me into fragments on the sheets.  And the small amount of breeze will shift them just far enough that I cannot reach them.

I survive this ritual leeching of the blades because I know it will come to an end.  The light will fade as the darkness deepens and I will be left alone.  Alone in the darkness with my fragments.  Alone with the pieces of myself that have been cut away and scattered about. I will lay there with my head in its perpetual position, staring upward at the fan, seeing through the peripherary the broken images that eventually grow too dim to understand as the dark takes posession of the room.

I rest in the dark.  It is my time of solace.  The time when I can pretend that I did not trap myself here.  That I did not choose this place of my own free will.  It is, afterall, my bed.  It is my room.  It is all of my making.  I decorated it, all of the items carefully chosen over the years.  Still, it is hard in the light not to fight to pull the fragments to me, to make a complete picture and step out of the frame.

Sleep has always been a friend to those who think too much.  Has it not?