What I forgot to remember #2

Long ago whenever I couldn’t sleep, whenever hallucinations moved and rose from the earth like giant obelisks from under my feet, I dared not close my eyes. If I closed my eyes I would see epileptic patterns and swirls flashing against my eyelids, inducing gut-tumbling nausea beyond reason, beyond relief. So when I was too scared to sleep on that straw mat hidden under the house, when I dared not shut my eyes, you sat up with me.

When you sat up with me, the clouds reflected the lights from the traffic thirteen floors below onto the papery skin of your face and the watery hollow of your unfocussed eyes. From behind you came the glow of a red bulb casting a dull sheen of blood over the wall, streaming over and struggling to fill the shadows created by my scratched-out flakes of paint in shapes and sizes matching the psychotropic delirium in my overheated mind.

I clearly saw you moving the thick air surrounding my body with a crumbling straw fan to cool me from feverish unrest. And then, from high above, far down below, from the right of me, then from the left just outside the reach of my outstretched arm, you sang a folksong, some lullaby, in a voice barely above a whisper. You sang in words I could not comprehend, though I knew the first word of each line was connected to the last to form a continuous food chain of the world. You sang showing me how to whip into line the disparate and scattered chaos, ordering for me all that was meant to be.

I wish I could remember and understand enough to see clearly the thread you weaved, but the older I get the more they tell me, and the more they tell me the more I don’t understand. And as much as I do not understand, as much as they affirm, by the crushed can, by the sunrise, and by the gap between the crusty lands, the blissfulness in willful ignorance, I have not yet found any such corresponding serenity.