Recognition and Oblivion

Dreams never come to those who search for them.  Dreams are shifty little gremlins; even the nice ones.  She closes her eyes with so much hope.  The day's events are nothing but a haze, a blur, little more than a fairy tale.  Faces of those she had spoken to, half formed.  Words shared have lost substance, lost formation.  Rain smears the images of neighbors in a collage of colors down the window.  All pain and sorrow of recent embittered love has made her heart heavy, made her feel sluggish.  Disassociation has become the covers in which she has wrapped herself.  And the mind begins to move.

What about love, she thinks, makes people give up everything? How is it so important to find love and strive for it if it doesn't last? The cold metallic grip it has, like being pinned under icy water by a metal beam. You can't move, you can't breathe.  Held there long enough, and you don't want to...  Her eyes grow heavy, her neck loosens a little.  Her breathing gets heavier, but regular.  Thoughts still swirl, muddy but ever moving, like a winding creek after a heavy storm.  Anything on the bank of her consciousness is swept up in the current.  There is no bottom.  Nothing underneath.  Only whatever has been brought to the water's edge.  She is swept away...

Julia dreams.

Voices dance together in a digressive cacophony.  They become a backdrop, a soundtrack.  Words so meaningless, even inaudible. Unintelligible. The ground under her bare feet is unstable.  Cold mud constantly shifting and quaking.  She can feel it, a virtual deluge, but she cannot see it.  The telltale lines and markings that rainfall makes in the vision of dreams are not there.  But she knows it's raining.  The voices rise in pitch, a banshee's wail.  Twisted, sickly trees worm their way up, out of the mud.  Like the tendrils of sea creatures, but wood, definitely solid, yet animated wood.  They climb high into the dreary sky.  All of them flailing, as if trying to grab a hold of some unseen target.  Or multiple targets.      There is a moment at the start of every dream where the dreamer's subconscious recognizes that things are not exactly as they should be.  When, in even the most pleasant of situations, it is realized that things are not all right with the world.  This has no effect on the dream itself per se, just on the natural fight or flight patterns of the individual.  In this case, Julia panicked.  The lack of control doesn't sit kindly with her.  And as with most things with the subconscious, the more she struggled to dominate the situation the more chaotic her world became...

Pasco.  As she runs, confused, frightened and weary, Julia sees movement out of her peripheral.  She doesn't stop running, her world stops moving as if watching a movie and someone hit the pause button.  The whole landscape freezes, nothing moves.  Rain drops, once unseen, hover.  The atmosphere looking like imperfect glass, riddled with air bubbles.  The constant shifting vortex above her becomes motionless though not becoming a singular color, but somehow every color at once and none at all.  The trees do not move, the ground does not slither, rocks stop barking, birds stop swimming.  Freeze frame.  Save for Julia's heart, and the black feline that slowly saunters around a tree, and moves closer to her.  It's face holding that look that cats get when they are stalking or investigating.  Julia breathes sharply through her teeth.  Pasco...
12 years old is an awkward age for everyone, though more so for a girl. There are many attachments that are strong for a preteen but one of the strongest is the bond between a girl and her pet. Pasco was Julia's friend, child, confidante, plaything and platonic lover, in equal parts.  Then one day he was gone.  There when she left for school, when she came home he wasn't.  And he never returned.  At first she thought he was lost, but then she began to believe he left. Abandoned.   

"Pasco...?" Her voice sounds so weak.  The black cat freezes, his back begins to rise.  As it does, sweet little Pasco appears to grow in size.  At first by a few inches, which then doubled until he stood at the height of a German shepherd.  Julia steps back, air rushing into her lungs as she gasps.  The thunder cracks again and in a brilliant instant all movement commences.  Bow cracks and branch falls.  The surface breaks and geysers unleash, the rivers of clarity expel their consistency.  Large Glass bubbles explode through time and pummel the sleeping earth.  As the limb crashes the moist forest floor hardens and takes on the characteristics of linoleum, the trees around it reach for each other and embrace until there is no distinction between individual and whole.  The rough texture of bark smoothes into the level compressed surface of drywall.  Kitchen. Her kitchen, no, too large.  Much larger, in fact than any kitchen she's ever seen.  But still there was a familiarity to it.  Like she should know who's kitchen she was in. 

Along one wall, there sits a small table meant for no more that two to sit.  It's the type of table that can fold out and become longer, but almost always is left with it's convenience hanging to the sides.  On the table, a typical size piece of paper lays with the intent to let one person know what another thought was important at the moment that they wrote it.  Julia picks it up and gives it a quick read.  Her eyes don't make sense of it, the words are made up of pen scratches and doodles.  She puts the paper back down.  Reading it is unnecessary.  Subconsciously she knew what it said before she even picked it up. 

"Why are you here, Pasco?" she asked as she turned to the doorway.

Pasco, with a cat's grace leaps up onto the counter.

"I came to warn you, Julia."  He stated while sniffing at the stovetop.  "There are things taking place that you have no idea about." 

Prophecies and riddles, the oddly cliché perfume of dreams.  Julia sits down in one of the kitchen chairs and places her hands between her knees. 

"What kind of things?  Like the end of the world?  Am I going to die or something?"  She jests. 

"I don't know, maybe.  I'm not a prophet, nor a psychic.  Just a friend Jules."  He jumps down from the counter and walks up to his companion.  "But I can tell you that you're ill."

Julia puts her hand to her lower lip.

"Cancer?" she whispers.

"You really are too dramatic girl," Pasco jumps up onto her lap and starts to turn.  "I mean emotionally speaking, you are not well.  You've traveled too deep into the mire of social susceptibility."  A smile creeps across her face, for a cat Pasco really has a talent for exaggerated dramatizing, she thinks to herself. "You've allowed the tribulations and afflictions of those around you to weigh too heavily upon yourself.  Your own problems have become a magnificent burden that you find difficult to bear."

As she absently strokes her hand across his coat, the words begin to step in line.

"Well, I'm sorry that I've got a lot on my mind right now.  Apparently cats don't have difficult decisions to make past whether they should sleep longer or claw the couch first."

Immediately she regrets the words, tries to pass it off as nothing more than a playful jab.  Pasco lifts himself up and begins to stretch. 

"Don't be sorry that you have problems Julia." He turns his head and looks her in the eye.  "Be sorry that you allow the problems of others be your own."  No sound was made when Pasco landed on the floor.  "And who are they to you?  More importantly, though, who are you to them?" 

The feline mews as he saunters out the doorway.  Julia drifts away from the table, intrigued.  What's in the other room?  Through the doorway she enters a room of silk.  The walls are draped in pinks and oranges, all the cloth streaming together in the center of the ceiling.  The floor is covered in pillows.  Candles sit on towering stands tickling the sheer walls with their soft light. Pasco collects himself in the middle of the room, tail tucked under his head.  Julia seats herself down next to her old friend. 

"Whose room is this?"  She asks.  Pasco lifts his head.

"This is my room."  He answers.  "I come here to think."

"You have your own room?" 

Pasco stretches himself out in his feline manner, and then sits back on his hunches. 

"Well, it's not really my room.  I kinda found it; I've been coming here for years.  No one seems to quite mind."  Julia reached out and dug three fingers behind Pasco's ears.  The cat rolled his head around, as if he wanted it everywhere at once.  His purr, so soft, ripples through the stillness adding to the serenity of the room.  The lights of the candles brighten and illuminate with his pure contentment.

"Is this where you've been all these years?  I thought you got lost.  I looked everywhere, but I couldn't find you."

"You couldn't find me because you were looking too hard."  The mark of confusion and shock on Julia's face was so intense that it threatened to remain, the kind of expression that seems to linger every time you look at that person.  "The more you wanted to find me, the less capable you became.  The fact is I was gone.  Gone and never meant to return.  Shame on you for letting something so simple jade you for so long."
Julia didn't know what to say to that.  Her mouth opened.  Empty.  Her mouth closed.  Rage. She tried to open it again.  This was easily becoming the struggle of the century. 

"What do you mean?"  Julia could feel her defenses going up, as she struggled to keep her cool.  "I was sad for a little while but that was all.  What do me mean jaded?"

The cat stands up and walks a few paces from the spot, turned and shot Julia with a look so easily misunderstood as terror, but looking deep in their eyes you secretly know that it's something more, much more.  Pasco wasn't looking at Julia, he was peering into her, reading some aspect that the young woman knew she wouldn't be able to see through a mirror. 

The cat's eyes were all she could focus on, the cool yellow almost glowing.  Julia began to see things, his eyes becoming a scrying stone. 

She was there, on the front porch of her parents, sixteen years old.  Crying.  Jason McCabe had just dropped her off after they went to see a movie.  She was frantic.  They had been high school dating; holding hands, passing notes, spending hours at a time on the phone listening to each other breath and talking to whoever else entered the room, for over two weeks.  She knew that she was beginning to really like him.  Fear of abandonment crept over her, and made her feel cold.  Two days later she broke up with him. 

She was standing in her dorm room listening to her messages.  Her father was pleading to the device, asking her to call him.  Guilt grows in her heart now as she relives the moment, remembering fully the resentment she had felt at the time.  He and her mother had filed for divorce and her father had moved in a small apartment with a woman he worked with.  She has only talked to him a hand full of times in the past five years, and left after only twenty minutes at his wedding reception.  She never shared more than forced pleasantries with her stepmother. 

  --Michael.

 Julia tried to shut her eyes at this point.  This was too new, the pain too strong, too much to deal with. 

"Pasco, please..." 

The front door of her apartment closed.  Hard.  The sound of a phone ringing over the line filed the air.  It wouldn't stop, and there was no sign that anyone was planning on picking it up. 

Pasco, large again, shakes his head slowly and turns to leave the room.

"Paz, please..."  Julia rises to follow.  "Please don't go!"  The tears were beginning to flow.  As she reaches the door way and crosses the threshold, the frightening familiar landscape of the forest enveloped her once more. 

Her sorrow and fear morphed into resentment and rage.  Her anger directed at the reversal of things.  She didn't want to be here before, even less was her urge to be back again. 

At the arrival of her anger, the already chaotic environment becomes engulfed in a seething maelstrom.  Lightning surges all around the stricken woman, like a thousand pillars blasting straight from the ground.  As if assaulting heaven itself.  Viciously, the wind blasts through the trees, whipping her hair like a thing alive.   Rain bursts in every direction. 

Michael was not her fault, she reasons in her irrational state.  She was not prepared for him.  She didn't ask for what they had.  She was never meant to feel the way she did in his presence.  Safe. Secure.  Whole.  Understood. Complete.  These things weren't hers to possess.  Great things lay in her future.  Impossible yet great things.  Many more could benefit from what she could offer.  That was more important than her own happiness.  What's-more, it was her choice, not anyone else's to make.  If she accepted it then why should he be concerned?  It's what she wanted...

"Your happiness is not the only one at stake, Julia."

Michael stood on a stage of fallen rock at the other end of the clearing.  His appearance was not cloaked in anger or hostility.  His countenance was not one of aggression or adversity.  He stood as he always has, painted in patience and radiating adoration and respect. 

"You aren't trading a future you never expected for yourself to possibly give those less fortunate a chance at a future they never thought possible.  You are running from a future you never thought yourself deserving of."  Michael held out his hand and took a step forward.  The tempest waned ever so slightly.  "I need you as much as anyone else.  I may have been more fortunate in health and education but I know nothing of love and happiness.  What makes me less deserving of your aid than anyone else?  With my love and understanding to strengthen your convictions and your kindness and reason to reenforce mine, there's nothing that could stop either of us. Nothing."

Julia awoke with a start.  Her mind clouded, still passing through the Shroud, she blinks.  The rain had died down, the incalculable moments of twilight passing.  Many important things lay at the brink of her consciousness, teetering between recognition and oblivion.  Colors and feelings more than anything resinated in her memory.  Something about a cat, and Michael, but that was no surprise.  He had been the focus of her problems for days now.  Then she recalled a note waiting intently for her to notice on a kitchen table, and the words intended just for her... "Call your father, he'll always forgive..."

    The end...

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