Once Upon a Grown Up

I toss, I turn. It is unclear where the cemetery stops, and the real world begins. The one with grass and trees and birds that sing the songs to others of their kind that simply ring out the idea: I am alive. The world I used to belong to before I started, bleary-eyed, down this road with a single wooden post I barely stopped to read. “What,” I think it said, but I will not look back. My feet, once so quick to skirt the sand composed of crunched up bones now drag heavy in the dust made mud in this land far too familiar now. How long have I been walking? What I would give for a drink of water. Though, I suppose, there is now nothing left to give. A lock of hair that once knew sunlight, I would shave it all off for a splash of rainwater against my feet were I able to lap the liquid greedily from my own toes. The memory of every smile I ever made. I would allow each one to blossom over my lips only to stopper them in a bottle for the consumption of a voyeur of emotions, puzzling over the idea of joy with no appreciation, nor comprehension, for the crinkled skin around my eyes or the pinprick of a dimple that calls out with inimitable authenticity. I would hold them up to receive but a patch of moistened moss so as to squeeze out the last few drops of wetness and taste it upon my parched tongue in this foreign wasteland where I have fallen once again. But behind shuttered eyelids in this land of skeletons, I find only the plotted path before me and plod on to the promise of that ephemeral land of “Next.”

I toss, I turn. But down is something different. The footsteps that stretch out across the gravel path before my eyes drive me on, and yet, there is something sinister in the way my foot falls so easily into the footprints I am following. As though I have walked this dream before. Am I Little Red Riding Hood who was so confident to skip past the trail marker in search of what lay beyond? Before me lies the cast of bare feet in the grey, baked earth—an effortless mold of my own slipper-less Cinderella winding down the trail. Have I been this way before? Or is there some other poor soul who came before and walked the very path I do now? I have seen no one, heard nothing, but the rustle of wind through caverns and chambers of discarded remains that line this path of dead and desiccated ideas.

I toss, I turn. Bleached bones discarded by their former users are scattered across the vast expanse of grey like Salt flats in muted monochrome. If it is not me whose tracks I follow, have I already found the bones of the one who walked before me and simply not recognized her stripped of the fleshy parts that make her human? Who might fail to find me when my body inevitably folds along the side of this scorched stretch of earth, if that is where dreams take place? The shiver that swallows my spine reassures me that I am still me, despite my fear that whispers not again. And so, my feet trod on, in the footsteps of someone who could easily be me if I had paid more attention as I shuffle forward. What started as an enchanted forest quickly unveils itself to be a land where the word “wild” has no meaning except to blame the expectation of happily ever after. I am gripped by the power of Orpheus if I should falter or turn to look back the way I came. Surely I might see a cavalcade of departed creatures marching with me in a circus parade of the damned toward whatever happens Next, though I have found no other trail head. No repressed, forgotten clue.

I toss, I turn. The debris of bones belonging to men and women lay in disarray across the cracked and cackling earth. I ignore the bones too small to be that of men or women, but I know that if I am ever allowed the luxury of dreaming unfettered again, those calcified children will haunt me every time I close my eyes. But it is not just people—for as long as I might join them, I must consider them people…or what am I anyway?—who lay on this demarcated far-flung spit of Tartarus without a pomegranate seed though I would willingly give my soul. The bones of animals I know and have never conceived of flung in heaps so that I wonder how they might once have been put together. An ossified puzzle made of only edge pieces that jut out this way and that and catch me around the ankles. A dog with each vertebra of its tail idles in the ash and I wonder if he once sprawled in the shade of a tree when he was a part of the world we left behind. Even Cerberus must have had a mother.

I toss—the hollow bones of birds lay in this fallow, hallowed ground. I turn—the fetid femurs like thickened tree roots break through caked earth alongside other wares from bears long gone. Were they alive I would be less frightened, and my heart rate quickens my pace as I begin to run past the remnants of fossilized algae and sharks, drug up from the darkened depths we like to pretend we understand. Suppose Goldilocks was brave in her curiosity of bears: open to her own unknowns making space for impossible truths that let light in. The wooden post at the front of the forest comes into focus as I recall there were two words etched by hand: “What If?” Shouldn’t we all be so lucky as to find ourselves devoid of pride when there comes a question we do not understand. Magic.

I toss and cower at the dragon skull with a full set of teeth unloosed from the opened, inert jaws. But I am gone before I begin to question if perhaps it was just a dinosaur from a forgotten place in a forgotten time or if this could be the convergence point of so many worlds. My worlds. I jolt at a rustle out of sight and convince myself it is the wind, nothing more. After all what is dreaming for? Before the accidents, before the deaths, before the griefs that fill our brains, we were all children first with visions of lakes and rivers rather than our thirst. With dreams that called in tinkling, twinkling songs at twilight from our beds with plush and fitted sheets where we could live out fantasies after we fell asleep. The days when blankets would nestle us in comfort rather than wrestle with us until we slunk from nightmares we detest. My brain turns sideways as the wonderings in my brain begin to wander beyond the path. I turn and there are cloven hooves and heads of herds and herds of horses. I see, but it cannot be, horns splayed out in front of them. Perhaps simply a part of another animal in the wrong place, put together by my mind as I hold up my flaking, fleshy hands and resist the aching urge to cry at their healthy, irreverent pinkness in the face of slain unicorns. For that is what they are—there is no need to make believe some new untruth. How many lies have I believed because I grew up in my world to be what I was taught, rather than what I imagined? Could it never have been something of the stories marketed as fairy tales but nothing more than a cautionary story to stick to the path of breadcrumbs—or else? The idea of being shoved into an oven inside a house made of sweets was always a story that felt like something to avoid, but to be a daughter that a parent would intentionally lead to slaughter was always the gory terror in the opening sentences of the story. Gretel knew the villainy of a father craven and so I will never fault her for running into the arms of a saccharine safe haven.

I toss, I turn. The tracks are deeper, the stride is steeper and I halt for the first time since I danced into the unknown of my own mind, my feet beginning to sally off the path. Inching at first, then pacing, now galloping and racing as I feel the enormity of the “what ifs” surrounding me. Every moment of every one of my bedtime stories pounding me when I make a choice, for even inaction is often the most potent potion. I fling myself into the mouth of the beast I now believe to be a dragon and curl my knees to my chest, weeping for the what-ifs of my life. Were I able to relive them all again I would choose those things that allow magic to filter in unbidden. Eyes squeezed shut in sleep or prayer, the warmth begins to trickle down my back and then—

I toss, I turn. I am astride the creature, shaking loose the dust of forgotten memories from her hardened, bronze-forged scales. A childhood companion who my imagination paled. My knees bow into her back, and we are flying through the air, climbing miles above the beaten path, wind whistled through my hair. Peering over her brilliant shoulder blade I see them all assembled below, with tusk and tooth and feathers and fur beginning to regrow. I let out a cry as we ascend a radiant sky that has no beginning, no middle, no end. Just a thousand shimmering figures below my imagination once allowed, and the cool, refreshing wetness of dew held so long in these pregnant clouds. The sun glints off bleached the white bones below, but the radiance of the display is so much greater as my worlds wave with winged arms and opened beaks. What-ifs restored to this dream that has no beginning, no middle, nor even satisfying end to send you off into the world of your own what-ifs as you embrace whatever comes Next.

Tonight, I toss and turn no more.