I wake up from what feels like a deep trance and find myself in an unrecognizable place. This reddish hue setting feels alive, with slight tremors experienced every other moment. The place looks and feels cold. It has a piercing emptiness, which is strange as the land ahead of me is occupied with what I think are mountains, hills, or something of the sort. Nevertheless, it feels like something is missing from it.
In fearful awe, begin to walk.
I go through the alive nothingness for a while, calling out for someone to help me until I see five people towards the west of where I am, “Finally,” I say under my breath.
“Hello, you over there! Can you hear me?” I ask to no response. Shocked, I walk towards the five people, hoping they do not run away or disappear. I notice that I am unable to make out their faces from afar.
I wave my hands again, but they don’t move.
“It’s not like I would get killed or something,” I say to myself. I cannot stay alone and risk being stuck here forever, but I don’t know who these people are. The decision, it seems, has already been made for me, and consideration is nothing but a mere formality.
Sigh. I take gingered steps towards them.
As I get closer, I realize these five people are different ages.
They are looking in different directions, too.
“Hello,” I say, to which they all look at me. “I saw you all from a distance, and I need help getting out. Can you help me?”
They do not respond.
Irritated, I turn my face away from them, accepting that I’d have to leave this strange place alone.
“Who are you?” one of them says suddenly.
I turn around, bemused that they could even mutter a word.
“Did one of you say something?” I say, looking at all of them one after the other.
The youngest kid turns towards me and asks again, “Who are you?”
Before I’m able to respond, his short but eventful life appears before my eyes.
In those bits and pieces of his memories, I see he’s gentle and annoying sometimes, but his heart is pure. I notice, though, that his face is blurred out in this journey through his mind.
“What did I just see?” I scream out loud, panting violently.
The child looks towards me and asks the same question he previously did.
“How do you expect me to answer this? What am I meant to make of what I just saw? Of your life?” I respond in trepidation to the emotionless child.
“Who are you?” asks the older kid standing right next to him immediately afterward, and before I know it, I’m on a journey through his mind.
I see he’s less gentle and more desperate for the bonds he’s formed over time to bloom, but he’s disappointed, as they do not. He’s impure, has wandered in the forest of life for short moments, and has lost his bearings.
I fall to the floor, holding my head after my journey through his mind is over. I look up at the older kid; tears fall from his eyes.
He looks down at me and says, “I’m waiting for your answer.”
I look at him, and yet again, I do not respond.
The teenager next to me asks the same question, and again, I’m taken through a journey of his memories.
I see he’s lost and broken; the spark in everyone’s eyes is no longer in his.
He is left unanswered, just like the rest.
The following person of the five is a young adult. I brace myself for my journey through his life.
“How many more of these am I going to…” before I’m unable to finish my sentence, I’m cut off by the trip.
He thinks he’s different from the world set out, but his indifference is communal. He is communal in the sense that he assumes that his desires are not of his world, and he’s scared of what would happen if the people in his world come to discover those desires, but, in reality, most people have these same desires. He’s passionate and has more hope in his eyes than the others who have questioned me before him, including the child.
Half-expecting another self-evaluating question, I brace myself for my trip through the next set of experiences the next person has gone through, but the next person delays his question.
I look at him, wondering why he delayed his question, “Were your eyes always that way?” I say, taking a slow step back.
His eyes are grey, as if there’s no soul, mind, or anything behind them. My eyes turn to see each of them, and their eyes are the same.
“How didn’t I notice this before?” I say to my panicking self, “Is anything I saw true?” I ask the last person before me. He looks at me menacingly and asks the same question the others have requested. I notice immediately that there’s something familiar about his voice. Suddenly, my eyes gain clarity like a veil has been removed, and I can see who the adult is.
It. Is. Me.
My hands become sweaty, and my throat dry. Thoughts race through my mind at a million kilometers per hour. I try to put everything I’ve seen and said in the past few minutes together, but I can’t.
“Why am I here? Why are your eyes grey? Why do you look like me? What’s going on?” I say, agitated. He laughs as if mocking my foolery and points at the rest.
I look at the rest of them with my hands on his shirt. The people I’ve been talking to are me.
An absurd situation like this does not warrant laughter, but that is all I can initially muster. I turn and attempt to run away, but my steps are stopped by what feels like quicksand. I look down and see a host of hands holding onto my feet. I kick and scream, and they all laugh at me. “Who are you?” a voice calls out to everyone in the room, stopping the pandemonium.
The same statement that has messed with my brain since I started talking to these strangers begins to echo around whatever this place is. The question pierces my skin from all directions. I cover my ears with my hands, but they squeeze past my interlocking fingers to terrorize my eardrums. With tears forming in my eyes, I conclude that I need to answer the question for this dream to stop.
I look up. They, the people who interrogated me, look at me. They look scared, probably more afraid than I am. I see that the complete greyness in their eyes is replaced with pitch black. The nothingness inside their eyes is replaced with something less daunting and more familiar: death. Tears fall from their eyes as they echo the question.
Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?
“I don’t know who I am,” I scream, hoping it would be a good enough answer, but it is not. The voice laughs, and a storm suddenly appears. As the winds accompanied by the storm build up, I see that the people who asked me who I am are no longer there; they’ve been blown away, and I’m left to wonder if any of the trips I went through were real. It suddenly hits me; all those trips were…my…
I’m carried away in the storm before I can complete my chain of thoughts.
The storm stops, and what was once soft ground covered in goo has become stone cold. Red has turned into a depressing grey. Everything that was once felt alive is now dead, and I stand at the center of that death.
A voice, the same that asked me who I was, yells something I can’t quite recognize but is nostalgically familiar.
“What did you say?” I scream out loud into the death that surrounds me.
“Lolli boy,” he calls out.
Suddenly, the name isn’t unrecognizable. It’s the nickname my mother gave me when I was five. I am bemused that someone except me is aware of this. I take gingered steps towards the source of the voice.
The voice says the nickname countless times, chuckling at irregular intervals. The sound of his voice appears closer each time. This cycle continues until I see a mirror covered with a cloak before me.
“Remove the cloak,” the voice says. I uncover the cloak to discover what I expected when I saw the mirror; the voice is me.
“What is this? Why am I here? Why am I talking to a reflection who can speak to me?”
No answer.
“Are you going to fucking answer me?”
The person in the mirror shakes his head and stretches out his hand. A hand pops out of the mirror.
“Allow me to take you where it all started,” he says.
He gestures for me to hold his hand and follow him into the mirror. “Why would I allow myself to jump into something like this? Why should I follow you?” I respond arrogantly.
“You ask a lot of fucking questions, don’t you?” he hisses back at me.
“You could decide to stay here forever,” he continues, “but I won’t make things easy for you”.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
He laughs and responds, “Haven’t you realized that I run this place, or does everything have to be said to you?” continuing, he says, “I can do whatever the fuck pleases me. I can make YOU suffer; it doesn’t bother me because you haven’t done a good job trying to please yourself.” He has a piercing look, a familiar one.
“I’m sure you enjoyed my puppets,” he says with an ominous laugh.
“I will hit you through this mirror,” I snap back.
“Well, that requires you to come through the mirror, doesn’t it,” he replies.
I consider his statements for a moment, all while trying to soak in all around me. There is nothing except this mirror and a psychopath talking to me through it.
“Do you want to come with me or not?” he asks, interrupting my thought process.
I’m unwilling to allow myself to be sucked into a mirror I know nothing of, but the fear of remaining in this place of uncertainty shrouds that unwillingness. I stare at the mirror and the outstretched arm before me, “There’s no way this isn’t a dream,” I scream into the nothingness around me, “Someone fucking pinch me. Someone, please.” It’s all a lot to take in. Tears start flowing down my face, but I have to decide. The man in the mirror is not the patient type.
“I’m going to be safe, right?” I ask him, indicating my willingness to travel into this unknown mirror.
“Of course,” he says with a wry smile.
Before I’m able to construct my response, he pulls me in.
The journey through the mirror is short, and I find myself out of the place of death and in another place in milliseconds.
I look by my side and see no one. I see no hand, nobody. I stand in shock and squint my eyes to find maybe a metaphysical body that I would somehow have the ability to perceive, but there’s nothing. My search for the person who pulled me suddenly hits me where I am. It was the first place I found true love or something close to it.
I walk forward a bit with my hands on my mouth. It’s the swimming pool I went to every summer as a child.
I walk around silently.
It’s empty, but the images of children running around and around the pool are enough to fill the emptiness.
Soon, I see a popsicle on the ground. I reach out to pick it up, and as I touch it, people appear like flowers popping up in spring.
I try to talk to one of the kids in the now wholly occupied pool, but none answer. Waanswerough the crowd of kids running around the edge of the pool, I observe kids jumping about the edge of the pool even though their parents say they shouldn’t, the older kids doing stuff their parents shouldn’t know about behind the showers, and other things humans do at the pool.
Then I hear a child crying. I walk to where the sound is coming from. It’s me. I’m the one calling. My eyes become blurry. I ask why the child is crying, and to my surprise, he replies, “I can’t find my mum.” I smile and tell him to hold my hand and walk with me, “Let’s find her together.”
The thought of seeing my mother again comes to my mind, and I try to keep my composure, but a mix of pure joy and grief courses through my bones. I anticipate the reunion I’m about to have, even if it’s only a fantasy.
We walk around for a while, having the type of conversation you’d expect to have with a child, until he points at a woman within the crowd. He holds my hand firmly and runs towards her. “Mum, this is my new friend,” he says as he introduces me to her. She greets me with a bright smile. Tears build up in my eyes; this is the first time seeing my mum in the flesh in fifteen years.
I become overwhelmed by the memories of who she was to me that come back as my eyes lay on her evergreen build.
I reach out to hug her and hold tightly to her, knowing that this may be the last time I see her as a person, not a picture or a memory. I want to tell her how much I love her and miss her with tears dripping down my face, but I’m unable to; this version of her wouldn’t understand.
To my surprise, she doesn’t resist or shrug. Instead, she hugs me tightly as I do. More tears flow down my face. All the noise behind me ceases. I release her and look into her eyes. She looks up at me, stares into my eyes, and smiles as if to say she’s fine where she is. I smile back and say, “I love you”.
Suddenly, I’m taken away from the entire scene and left to watch what is happening from a distance.
The child I was just holding is now holding someone else's hands, the first love of my life: my best friend Amaka. I smile, and almost immediately, I’m ported from the pool into another place.
I look around. It’s a school environment. The secondary school I went to.
“I know this memory,” I say out loud and run to the school’s auditorium. I find my younger self in a secluded corner with tears dripping down my face.
“Hey, little man,” I say, “I know you’ve just lost the most important person to you, and you’re confused….”
“Stop and watch,” the voice says suddenly.
Immediately, I’m ported out of the scene.
In what seems like an eternity, I watch as the kid grieves on his own. “Let me go meet him, please,” I say to the voice.
“I want you to see something,” he says sternly.
With reluctance, I continue to watch.
He sits alone until Amaka joins him. She hugs him and starts to cry. I can’t hear the words she says to him, but I’m sure they’re reassuring. I guess my mother was as much of a mother to her as she was to me.
“I can’t remember this memory. I can’t remember most of them.”
There’s no response.
With relief, I say to the voice, “She was the only person who came?”
“Yes, she was,” the voice replies.
“Why?”
“She’s the only one who could feel the pain you felt,” he says, “I have one more memory to show you.”
“Wait, I want to look at them for a moment,” I say to the voice.
I look on for a bit longer, lingering on a moment I had wiped out of my memory.
“Let’s go.”
I’m in a bedroom. The sheets are linen and covered in rose petals. The room is scented, and the mood is anticipating a great night.
My college self walks in with some girl, a friend of a friend.
The girl notices his nervousness and tries to calm him down. It works for a while, but he’s unable to hold himself together and panics.
He kisses her, interrupting a sentence she was making.
She picks up on the mood and kisses him back, takes off his shirt, and brandishes kisses all over his body. He does the same, carefully making his way down her thighs until she gently moans. In the heat of the moment, though, he realizes that he just cannot have sex with her and lets go of her.
She leaves the room in anger – maybe disappointment – and he’s left alone again. He’s not sad, but he feels terrible. He knows why he can’t have sex with her or any other girl he’s tried to.
“I wish my mom were here,” he says to Amaka on the phone, whom he called a few moments after the girl left, “She would make me feel accepted.”
Amaka sighs and responds, “I know you miss her a lot. I do, too, but you must acknowledge yourself without her. Just know that I’ll always be there for you.”
He produces a faux smile and tells her goodbye.
Rain begins to pour. He looks outside the window and says, “Amaka will be there for me, I guess.”
“I wish I knew about it earlier; she would have loved to know,” I say to the voice.
The voice doesn’t respond for a while, and I’m left ruminating over what I just saw. I remember this memory vividly.
“Go meet him,” the voice says.
I move from where I am and sit next to him. He sits up, leans in, and rests his head on my shoulder.
There is quiet.
Words fail to come out of my mouth.
I hold on to him tightly and close my eyes.
.
.
.
A few moments later, I find myself in the cold place in front of the mirror. The cloak is gone now, and I can see the man's body in the mirror.
He looks at me with a piercing look and asks me the inevitable question that has defined my journey through this landscape he created, “Do you know who you are now?”
I look at him, trying to decipher everything I saw but can’t bring myself to. “I know you took me through all of that for a reason, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to gain,” I respond, looking down.
His hand reaches out and touches my shoulder. His touch feels warm, polarizing the menacing stare he had just a minute ago.
He holds my shoulder silently for a short while, then looks directly at me. I don’t have the confidence to look up at him, but he encourages me to. With our eyes locked, he says, “Who you are is a mix of what you’ve seen, experienced, learned... All the events that happened before you have had a part to play, yes, but I need you to focus on the people you’ve had those experiences with.”
I stare at him blankly.
He sighs and continues, “Did you see you lost the spark in your eyes after your mother died? You were a child willing to talk to a stranger and introduce her to your mother.”
My shoulders drop.
“No, don’t do that,” he says, “Change isn’t necessarily bad. I mean, your mother’s death led you to try new things. It forged a stronger relationship with Amaka and made you realize you didn’t want to be an astronaut.”
He steps out of the mirror and asks me to walk with him. I do.
“All those experiences matter, and the people you had those experiences with matter. What you’ve done the past few years is throw that all away and try to run away from them. Has that helped?”
“I wanted to recreate my journey and start a new life.”
“I understand that, and as I said, change isn’t necessarily bad. Change brings new people into your life and can be good,” he replies, “but pushing away your past and all that has shaped who you are is foolish to me.”
“I never asked to be without my mother,” I reply shaky. “She was all I had.”
“Don’t you see what I’m trying to tell you? Don’t let your pain control you.”
The man in the mirror sighs; I reckon he can feel my pain.
“Do you miss her?” I ask.
He looks at me with watery eyes and says, “Yes, I do. Every day, as much as you do. But I’m not going to allow her death to hold me down like you have.”
He stretches out his hand, but his entire body emerges from the mirror this time.
We’re face to face, breath to breath, and looking each other in the eyes.
He embraces me.
.
.
.
I wake up suddenly from what felt like a deep trance and find myself in my physical bedroom. No mountains, no heartbeats except mine, no cloak, just me.
A tear falls from my right eye, a signal of joy, “It was just a dream,” I say.
i'd be lying if i said this isn't a masterpiece
This was insanely good. Holy shit