Embracing the cave

I was resting on an old chair in a warm room, my coat a blanket and my arms a pillow. An unfortunate coffee, drunk during a time of hunger, kept me from true sleep. Locked into a partial awareness, I could not fall into my unconscious mind. Instead I remained in a stasis of perception, where no fantasies should have reached me and where I would have no true reprieve from the fatigue that had begun to plague me.

And yet, both of these assumptions proved false. For a waking dream came and delivered me to a place of strange refuge, where the tiredness of my body left me and my heart was satiated by a disturbing visage of my past.

The light in the window fluttered and coaxed my left eyelid upwards, until it hung midway as a crescent moon in my vision. It was only then that I found myself stood in the briny refuge of my own eyelid, gazing out at the world beyond it. My sight split between three perceptions.

My own eye saw the placid and distant form of myself, standing a few paces down from a precipice, where a tear might fall. This phantom self stood gazing at a world too great in scale for him to traverse, but too terrific in its construction to look away from.

A third form, caught somewhere between the other two, recognized the strangeness of my visions and found itself entangled in the thin veil separating my fantasy from reality - with no consideration as to which one held what title.

Previously I wondered whether I had been the original inhabitant of my body - spurred by a medically induced euphoria which had separated me from the spiraling decent that had once transfixed my soul.

I imagined two versions of myself; the one who writes this, free from the burdens and fears that I had once weighed myself down with; and the one who retains that weight, clutched by an unseen hand, drowning in the infernal abyss deep the unknown parts of my ethereal form. Forced to watch another take his place at the helm of an unfaithful ship, piloting it with a skill that he only dreamed of.

I had feared this long before I found this absolution and considered this fate inescapable. But now I see that if this split of the soul occurred at all, it would have given each part of me the life that each most desired.