A Face You Must Face

The past I know is not so orthodox to the system of time we understand as humans. Rather, the past I know is the one we all carry, the one that connects us across the millennia of birth-givers who carried our souls in warm water, whose hands hold me close when I dream, whose face(s) I am haunted by.   

A past that haunts, a past that taunts, a past that flaunts its face, is no face you want.

I awake to the smell of my unwashed bed sheets. Musky. Salty. The scent of yesterday’s trip to the beach. I’m mostly naked, except for a tank top now soaked with my sweat. I was dreaming, I think. Or perhaps I wasn’t at all. I must have been though, because their hands held me close, they held me softly, they were so proud of me. And I of them. I don’t know their face though. I don’t know them at all. The only times they visit me, to cradle me, to engulf me, is when I dream. The first time was fleeting. They waved, then vanished. The second time was amusing. They pointed, then poked my heart. The third time was reassuring. They showed me their palms, then the lines sketched onto them. The times afterward were never less unordinary, but were never more intense. Each night, I became eager to dream their hands, to know their touch, to feel their power, to dance with their spirit. Each night, I became convinced I was important, that I could do anything, that I could be anyone, that whatever I knew tangibly in the reality outside my dreams was no match for the hands I carried within me. They were no match for the hands that spoke to me, one night.

“For I have shown you my hands, my heart, my soul, but you, less than even one finger.”

I am startled awake. My finger tenses, curls, fractures open. I am gripping my bed-sheet. It rips from its corner. I am swallowed by my linens, convoluted, now ingesting my naked body. Exposed. Stripped of even my skin, of my fascia, of my bones. I am a glob. I am not even nothing. No hands to save me. No fingers to prod me open. No palms to cradle me. Dreams that run dark, that leave no exhaust behind its running engine. Dreams, now, that haunt me, with no hands, but rather one face. Empty. Expressionless. Grey. Sorrowed. A face warping my dreamscape, an upside down rollercoaster, an underground escape, a nighttime brawl in alley way suburbia. A face I do indeed recognize. Because it is my own, somehow. Because it is my ancestry, from other cosmic spheres, from other astral fields, from other blurry dreamscapes.

I am faced. I am haunted. I am ghastly. I am a perturbed creature awaiting saviour, distracting itself from the inevitability of past lives reaching a face I must face. Of past hands coercing me into believing I was somehow invincible. That I was seemingly omniscient. But I was. I am. For my hands told me so. Hands that now grew, hands that now flew from their sockets, that elongated and stretched and elasticized to poke holes in my face. That created divots for owl eyes, that gave away excess skin for a pointed nose, that offered flesh for skinny lips, that invoked spirit for brown iris. I became whole, except, I was missing my soul.

My dreams are now faceless. My dreams are now handless. My dreams still haunt me, though. My dreams construct my soul. Rather, they relearn what it means to have one in the first place. You see, we are nothing but wormholes, a vacuous space of time and energy and material form playing, laughing, screaming, punching, dying, until we see our face. Until we see the hands that sang to us when we rested, that soothed us when we waded in warm water, but that also threw us in the garbage, that sucked us up and cried they couldn’t keep you, that fed you until you imploded. I see those faces too. The grey ones. The listless ones. The ones burrowed under igneous rock. The ones trapped in a burning fire, unable to see past the heat. They haunt me too. Their hands reaching for me. Their fingers crusted, faint, devoid of any blood flow. I feel sorry for them. I feel inclined to help. But I never can.

I fall asleep one last time. A flagpole whips in the wind, my open window revealing night secrets. Not even birds sing. It’s too late for that. A car pulls into my driveway. An ignition settles. A door swings open. Footsteps upon surface concrete - soft, nimble, progressive. Keys reveal a house’s dreamscape. Heads now rustling atop pillows, dreaming faces, dreaming hands, dreaming nothing, too. A house now haunted. A house now filled to the brink with sleepless bodies. Souls laughing. Souls screaming. Trapped in mazes with neither entrance nor exit, only trails, only soil, only acceptance.

I dream hands. I remember you. “Hello again”, I remark. This time I receive no response. Only a gentle wave, fingers flapping in wind, palms etched with ancient markings, as if they were lost in quicksand, or buried under desert dirt. “No longer do you visit me”, I say. A whisper – indiscrete, uncommunicable, fluffy – “For you have shown me nothing, a face you must face, forever.”

I dream again. A face. The same greyed tone. The same sorrowed shape. The same rollercoaster, this time, though, downside up. My dreamscape rides along, circuitously, a face rides along with me. Never smiling. Never moving. Just floating. Lingering. Growing fingers invisible to my psyche. And then I am no longer dreaming. I am no longer riding. I am free. Except, a face I must face, for there is no exit nor entrance to this peculiarly picked place.

“Did I win!?”, I cry to my Momma. “Did you see me!?”, I become desperate. Panicked.

“I’m sorry, dear, you were only just another face. I did not see you.”

I weep.

I am not even nothing.