Dream d168-s: Aqui

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I looked at my hand and could see through it.

Not transparency exactly - more like the hand was losing its argument for being a hand. The edges where my fingers met the garden's gold-lit air had become negotiable, bleeding outward in threads the color of old attention. I could see the flowers through my palm. The flowers did not notice, or did not care, which felt worse.

Thoughts were leaving me visibly. I watched them go - small luminous shapes lifting from somewhere near my temples, moths made of half-formed sentences, rising into the oversaturated air and dispersing. One of them had been something important. I could not remember what.

Lano threw his whole body against my leg.

The impact was the most solid thing I had felt since the voiceless garden, since the silent zone, since the long descent. He pressed and pressed, small and insistent, and where he pressed the edges of me firmed slightly, remembered their position.

"Lano," I said, and my voice had texture again.

"Aqui," he said. Here. He had never said that before.

The owl arrived the way weather arrives - not from a direction but simply as a new condition of the air. He landed on nothing, his autumn-leaf feathers catching colors that had no names in the language I had arrived with.

He looked at my hands for a long moment.

"Reality," he said finally. "From the Latin realis - of things. From res - a thing, a matter, a something-that-exists." He paused. The particular pause that meant he was finding his way toward the part that mattered. "The question the Gardens are asking your hands is: what things are you made of. What matters constitute you. When the res becomes uncertain, the realis follows." Another pause. "You are becoming a question the garden is asking itself."

Lano pressed harder.

I put my dissolving hand on his back and felt his warmth and the specific aliveness of him - the way a living creature pushes back against the world with every breath, the small constant insistence of a heartbeat. Under my palm the threads pulled back in. The edges reconsidered.

"The little witness," the owl said quietly. "He knows what you are made of when you have forgotten. This is why I told you."

I gripped the notebook. The notebook was solid - all that accumulated writing, all those pages from the trap clearing and the fork and the descent, the weight of what had already been witnessed and set down. I pressed it against my chest and felt myself return further, consolidating around the record of where I had been.

The moths that were my thoughts slowed their departure.

I wrote with hands still faintly translucent, at the heart of the dissolution: