(crossposted to Facebook)
In my dreams there is a labyrinth that comprises the world.
Every landmark building in my earlier life has dissolved into this amalgam. The first time I went to a hospital. The first shopping mall I saw. The stairs of Chowrasta Market. Every church my father has preached in. My schools, primary and then secondary.
Somewhere in there is a food court with stalls that sell the flavours of my childhood. There is an atrium many stories high. If you throw yourself from the railing without caring if you live or die, you will fly. It is riddled with secret passages that I alone know the ways of. These are needed because there is a faceless enemy that stalks me through it.
Again and again I return to its corridors. I have a poor memory for specifics of places. I’m bad with directions. Things shift around in my memory, sliding and rotating like blocks in a game. What I remember are impressions, blurs of colour and feeling.
As I get older, even my young adulthood, university days, begins to fade from the sharp passion of distinct memory and merge with this dreamscape.
I have an extracorporeal vision of myself at twenty-one, in overalls and gardening gloves. Cutting dead peonies outside the library, in the rain, I feel its gray stone walls begin to melt.