Sunlight-Colored Roses

Winter Solstice, 2012.
1.

The road is dusty and long. The sun so bright I squint and duck my head back into the shadows. I don’t know why I got pulled out of class. I don’t know where they’re taking me.

Beneath the mesa the cliff extends its shadow, and I see walls of windows reflecting light away from the dwelling embedded in the cliff. I am not familiar with this institution.

Once inside, I view my surroundings through dim, artificial light. The dwelling seems to extend infinitely into the mesa, but I don’t go further in. The interior is blocked by windowless doors and solid walls.

People are hanging around the entrances. They look like they’re hanging around clubs. Their clothes are trendy. The girls have long, shining hair. But their faces are caked with makeup, seemingly to hide the cratered appearance of their faces, and their eyes, which have receded. Their heads seem disproportionately large, and their skin is, as I said, cratered, parchment-like, and very sallow.

I draw back, feeling afraid of them, but their eyes go right over me. They look preoccupied with their own affairs. They whisper and discuss, faces close to one another.

I bump someone as I move backward from them. Or maybe somone bumped me. A hand slides up my hip, sending an impulse of warning through my body. I turn around and dangling between these craven forms is a young person, maybe a boy, thin and seemingly boneless, moving around like he’s not in his right mind.

I am terrified of him. Unlike the others, all of his attention is focused on me. His face is composed of three eye-slits that have been sewn up, and from these slits moisture is continuously trickling. He has no nose, and his mouth is small, vestigial-looking. His dark hair is shorn close. I can see the white skin beneath.

I look back toward the others. They have no visual reaction to me, or to him. I leave the room, and he follows me.

This part of the cliff dwelling is walled by windows. The rooms, which are appointed with beds and bedside tables, like hospital rooms, are darkened. It’s night-time.

I am alone in one of the rooms with this person, who has followed me. I believe that he has the mind of a child. Maybe I can persuade him to get into bed.

I lead him to the narrow bed and convince him to lie there. As I see him lying quietly I’m overwhelmed with fear, and I take the sheet and cover him with it, blocking him from my gaze. But the moisture trickling from his eyes dampens the sheet in the three places where his eye-slits are. He remains unmoving.

2.

I am surrounded by others who cannot explain to me why I am here because we don’t speak the same language. I wake up in the sun-filled atrium adjoining the interior rooms of the cliff dwelling, where I have never been. I never need to eat or change my clothing. I am just here. There is no one directing me as to how I should fill my time.

I go into the other atrium rooms, which are sunny, but empty. I make the beds, which are unmade, and I empty the small wastebins. They are filled with nothing but gobbed tissues. I empty the contents of the cans into a large black trash sack. The tissues are gobbed with glimmering moisture that has begun to turn crystalline.

Two people have entered the room behind me. I remember them from my first night here. Their rooms are labeled “Gabriel” and “Leya.”

Leya has long straw-colored hair that hangs in tousled braids. She is tall and slim, and she always holds hands with Gabriel. They wear jeans and vintage shirts. They look like normal teenagers, except for their faces. They have three sewn-up slits where their eyes should be.

Tears are always oozing from their three eyes, like wounds that won’t heal. It was hard at first to look at them because I felt afraid of their leaking eyes but now I feel like they are my friends, even though they don’t speak to me.

Leya’s and Gabriel’s hands dance together in intricate patterns and are in constant movement. They are continually linked and in agreement. I go with them to find William.

William is my friend now. I was afraid of him at first, but not now. His roving hands which put me off so much at first I grab and hold firmly. I don’t like him touching my body in that flailing way.

His hands flounder in mine like the rebellious tail of a cat, but after a while they go still.

We all sit in the atrium on comfortable couches. Tissue boxes and waste bins are always around. The atrium feels like a waiting room. I always feel like a lot is happening in the internal space of the cliff dwelling, but I don’t want to go in, further away from the sun’s light.

3.

Something is happening within me. I was always a pretty sensitive person, but now my heart is wrung with feelings like a sponge. As soon as I wake up I feel like there is a heavy weight in my chest. My heart aches as the sunlight spills across my sheets and me.

I press my hands to my heart and start crying. I want to feel the wind on my tears. I am baking in this hot, airless atrium. I feel confused, lonely but more than anything like something is happening around me that’s complicated and bad. It feels cleansing to cry this way, but it doesn’t ease the pain in my heart.

My door opens and William flies toward me. He climbs into my bed and throws his arms around me. I bury my face against his shirt and hold him close as my tears flow freely. I feel like a gate inside me has been opened, and my heart feels like it’s glowing. Warm energy transits between his heart and mine, and our energies conmingle, blighting my mind as I grapple intellectually with what is happening to me.

But my conscious awareness dims and I surrender it easily, going internally in my awareness of our communion at this heart-level. Finally I pull away, tears sliding down my face. The connection is so intense I don’t know how to keep my heart from breaking. I couldn’t have this level of open-heartedness in the real world without having my heart broken.

William’s face has no expression and offers me no clues as I study it. If he felt what I felt I have no sign of it offered in his looks or behavior. But my heart is glowing in the aftermath of the intense connection we felt.

He takes my hand in his very tenderly and runs his hand down my arm. Physically I feel appehensive but I stand and follow him.

We move down a narrow corridor that ends abuptly with a small door. William opens the door to reveal a sunlit tangle of trees, grass and flowers.

I hold his hands as we enter the glade.

The trees are strung with myriads of crystals fine as a spider’s glittering web. Large crystals dangle like teardrops in the shadows. The wind lifts and cools the tears on my cheeks. The sound of birds and rustling leaves blurs with warmth. The sweetness, I taste it on my tongue as my senses begin to slide together.

The most beautiful energies have coalesced in this enchanted realm. The only animals I see are birds and butterflies, but I feel the presence of life flickering around me and in my heart. The crystals strung from trees and bushes glimmer and make soft, rustling chimes as the wind blows.

William and I hold hands and are warmed by the light. I feel I am being restored to wholeness under the sun’s healing balm.

4.

It’s the middle of the night. I feel awakened by fear, and I sit up in bed listening intently in the darkness. Even though I can’t hear anything I know something horrible is happening. I’m afraid to even move from this bed. Something evil has broken inside this dwelling while I was asleep, and it’s here now.

I rise and go into the hallway. I walk down the corridor, feeling leaden in the unreality of the dark, silent hours.

The other rooms are empty. I don’t know where my friends have gone.

I wander in the dark to the heavy metal doors that lead to the interior of the cliff dwelling. I push back one of the heavy doors and enter the swallowing darkness.

The darkened stairs descend as though they lead to seating in an auditorium. I see empty seats filling a large ampitheater. On the sunken stage far beneath me is a small group of people leaning over a body on a gurney.

Leya’s body is lifeless. The stitches have been removed from her eyes to reveal yawning chasms, all three. Her mouth gapes. As though there is nothing inside her.

I’m frozen with terror, afraid to give my presence away. The people with her are human, like me. The first humans I’ve seen since I was left here.

They are attempting to jolt her back into life, but the electrical shocks return only shallow neural responses. Her heart is dead. They don’t give up easily. They pump more electricity into her body, till her head lolls to the side and her black eye-holes seem to stare at me. The moisture that trickles constantly from the sewn-up eyeholes of all of the Eyeless, as I call them, is entirely absent.

Finally they slip her body into a bag and zip it, gather their equipment and leave. I follow them all the way to their van without their seeing me. Next to the van is parked a large semi, at a loading dock. Boxes are resting in the semi. I open one, and I see it is filled with crystals. They glow with palpable energy, and I draw back, feeling electrified being so close to them. Their energy, when they are congregated, is entirely different than when they were strung and dangling in the woods. Concentrated together the energy is powerful and something different entirely.

At the same time I feel answering energy in my heart, as though communicating with this highly converged force.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. It’s too much power. The purity in the energy I felt in the woods, and in William’s arms isn’t here.

I am still in the semi when the door closes and the engine starts up, and I am in motion.
5.

Christmas lights winking like beacons of warmth and hope.

My heart wants to believe so that I can feel warm and safe.

I pull off the side of the road and lean over the steering wheel, and tears blur my view. Nothing will ever seem the same way again now that I’ve seen and learned the things I have, and “Christmas” is just a childish notion that I’ve outgrown.

When I go out in public now, I get physically ill at the things I see and hear. What people think love is. They are trapped in a self-fashioned wolf-den of dead bracken by their insecurities. They process and interpret everything through their egos.

I can’t separate myself from this society for even a moment. We are the ones who are sightless. The Eyeless are the ones who see.

The city stretches below my vantage point on the mesa, partially obscured by a haze. Through the veil, the lights glimmer cheerfully. The lights are powered by my Soulmate’s Crystal tears.

Gradually as people learn what is being done and how others are suffering they pour the sand in their eyes and they settle back into their walking sleep.

Diffused responsibility.