Sweet Dreams

Angel in White

The bars were cold.  I clenched my hands around them tighter, scared and desperate.  Let me out I screamed but there was no one else; there was nothing else.  Just blackness.  Endless halls of blackness.  I turned but the bars were always before me, my hands turning pale as I gripped them as if for my life.  A man in all white sat before me, but there was nothing underneath him, or maybe I just didn’t see it.  His pale blue eyes turned towards me.

“Struggle not…” he rose and leaned close to the bars.  He was only those pale blue eyes and white.  Nothing else.  “And trust belief.”  He falls over backwards, now only white and feathers.  I scream and scream.  There are no words.

The pillow and sheets were spewed across the floor.  Music beat endlessly into the emptiness. I struggled to rise, only to fall to the floor in a heap of frustration. 

I have been condemned.  It’s true.  Although it’s not what anyone else would think is condemnation, but it is for me.  For me now.  I live with people who do not see.  They are blind to everything this world is, its glory.

The music echoed on, through my soul.  Its simple beats and nerves numbed the mental passageways and cleared some of my thoughts away.  Music was just one of many things I took pleasure in that others, all the others failed to comprehend.  Music was gone. 

It was forbidden.

The music was data collected and stored on small green floating discs.  Each song was one I had spun together with my mind, reading music off a books pages, then storing the newly created data song onto one of my disc creations.

I stood on my bed and reached up to the ceiling for a new floating green disc.  I grabbed one at random, and pushed down the center button.  The title on the disc was unfamiliar.  As it began to play the other song stopped on its own. 

This song had words.

Shocked, I grabbed the disc back out of the air, and turned the music off.  When had I ever created a song with words?  I reread the title of the song.  “There goes the fear.”  I thought vaguely, I remembered it.

I rose and walked up to the wall across from my bed, and farthest from the door.  A book shelf suddenly appeared.  I stepped as close to it as possible, using all of the meager light in my room to see what the shelf held.  Scanning its contents, I found what I sought.  It was a blue book with a gold binding.  I brushed off some dust.  This had been a book from my early year,’ my terrible early years.  And it hit me.  This song wasn’t mine; this was a song someone else had given to me. 

I cringed.  I did not want to read this book but it had sought me out.  Something told me it was time; that I should at least take a look.  When coincidences happen, such as a certain song playing on random and a nightmare that follows a journal entry, all which led me to approach a specific memory of my past, even if horrifying, is just that now- not a coincidence.  Even if deep down I didn’t want to read the journal- now it was a need, interwove into a part of me.  It wasn’t a choice.

I backed up onto my bed and sat down.  The book seemed to stare at me.  It spoke with a little girl’s scared voice. A voice strongly misunderstood.

The lump in my throat grew and I tried to swallow.  As fate would have it, it was time.

I opened the old dusty hard cover and rested my head back against the wall.  The first page was blank with a few symbols I knew better than any other living soul, Symbols that were a childhood boredom creation, signifying a complex meaning of hope and will.  The book smelt of decaying memories.  I turned the page.

The next page was dated at the top; march 18th 3038.

The book was hand bound, filled with many different textures and colors of paper.  I was proud of this journal; paper is hard to come by.  Trees are nonexistent.

I had stolen the papers from teachers, and students, compiling them into this journal, one of my few real paper journals.

I hushed the voice of my past that was screaming to shut the book.  No one wants to recall their most horrid memories.

“A teacher called on me to read a piece from a book, a digitally developed book.

I told her I wouldn’t do it.  She glared at me.  She told me I was a stupid child and did not deserve to be in this school.

I told her I didn’t mind leaving, if they would let me.  It slipped out.”

I skipped the next few lines, remembering what happened with disinterest.  The teacher told me if I could fly away they would let me leave.  I told her I would.  What happened after that is of no concern.

I flipped through the pages; each new texture of paper and color of ink brought forth a different memory.  The years in this book were the first years I began to believe.  They had also been my worst years; ones that only led to another and thus here.

Concealed within the last few pages was a feather.  It complimented the one sentence on the very last page.  I smiled that the feather was still there.  As I gently brushed my fingers along the edge, my smiled faded.  It had been so long ago.

“One day I too will grow wings and fly away.”

I sighed.  I had yet to accomplish my only goal, my only dream.

I was ten years old when I wrote in this journal and wrote that sentence.  That day had been the first time I awake late at night, and still remembered something from one of my dreams.  The only thing I still remember for sure, to this day, of that dream, is the words that someone spoke.  “There is a full moon tonight.”  It was just enough, that when I woke, I rose from my bed in search of the full moon, something I had heard of once or twice, but had never laid eyes on.

Impulse led me deep into the windy halls of the school.  Eventually I was lost, and I began to follow my feet, my gut, and walked ahead towards a nonexistent destination.  It was a beautiful walk, and the halls were deadly silent in slumber.

I followed my feet, one after another.  They led me to a door, and from pure curiosity I chose to open it. 

In the moonlight, upon a balcony I did not know existed, stood a man.  He was wrapped in white, pure eternal beauty, a look most befitting for an angel.  There was a light in his eyes, a brilliance in his attitude. 

The white angel smiled and bowed at me motioning forward and patting the spot next to him on the balcony next to where he stood.  I hesitated, walking cautiously forward and lifting myself up to where he had motioned.  “I see you’ve found me.”  The white angel’s words were a calculated softness, a voice of a father and a god mixed in one.

I looked up at him.  He smiled down at me.

“Beautiful night.”  He lifted his head toward the sky.  It was a sky I had never laid eyes upon.

It was forbidden.

“All you have to do.”  He stepped onto the balcony’s edge and raised an arm up into the sky.  “Is reach out and grasp on.”  He took the moon in both hands and slid off the balcony’s edge.  The mood did not move, but held him aloft along with the stars.

“If you believe, then anything is achievable.”  He stepped back onto the balcony.  “Can you remember that?”

I shook my head.  I would learn to believe.

He reached into his robes and pulled out a little disk, floating data that glowed with a green radiance.  “Take this.  I think you will need it more than me.”  I reached out with a cautious hand but took the green disk eagerly. 

“Anything is achievable.”  He looked back up at the moon.  “One day, when you learn to believe, I will see you again.”

He leaned back, sliding off the balcony and suddenly lifted into the air.  Huge white wings spread from his back and he glided, he flew, off into the far distance of darkness and stars.  One feather, one single white beauty, slowly drifted down toward me.  I stood on the balcony’s thick stone railing and reached up into the sky. 

The feather drifted into my hand.

As I followed my feet back to my room, I made a promise to myself.  I promised no matter what happened, I too would believe.  And one day, I too would grow wings and fly away under the moons ray.