The Last Dusk

NO, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine; Make not your rosary of yew-berries, Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl A partner in your sorrow's mysteries; For shade to shade will come too drowsily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. - John Keats, Ode to Melancholy, paragraph II

Birthcry

I sleep. I twitch in a nightmare. It is dark. A dark, confused reality. A horror that does not end.

''The sentence is death'', he had said, in the gloomy courtroom on that day. It was so silent in there, the rain outside being the only sound, falling on the stone paved alley outside the windows. So silent, except for his firm voice speaking the words.

I will die. Poor little Kiandra will die. It usually feels funny, in a sick way, when I am not overwhelmed by the fear. Or, perhaps it is not really fear, but sadness. Yes, sadness for the loss of all that is dear to me, my thoughts and feelings. There is no other sadness like this one, and no way to describe it, but still every word that tries to describe it is a cliché. It fills every minute in my life, every painful whiff of breath. It permeates my fragile body and my muddled mind. The sadness is worse than pain, as in pain I feel that I am at least alive. But the sadness comes from being dead while being alive. It is dark border that looms behind every bush and rock. It is a shadow that will inevitably come every night. There is no hope, only expectation.

''The gas will cause the heart to fail, and after that she will have a few seconds left'', he had said. ''She will not smell the gas when it comes, and it will make no sound.''

I listen to my heartbeat. A beat, a beat, a beat, a beat, a beat, no beat, no beat, silence. Silence, where is the beat? Beat, please come on. Please, not now. Please. A beat, a beat, a beat. Thank you. A beat. Silence.

''The trigger may go off also during night'', he added in a regular way, this old man in his old-fashioned suit.

''You will be taken to your cell'', he had said. ''And you will be locked there. There will be a device in the wall of the room with a random lock. When the lock opens, any day, any minute, it will release the gas that will execute the sentence. That may happen today, or any other day from now.''

Now, or next second, or next second, or next second, or now...

That is what they had said, before they took her away to the lonely room, to count the seconds, while listening to the shivering breath, rushing in and out of her lungs that were as nervous as she was. The random procedure was utilized to remove the guilt from the executioner. So was I told, in that story.

It had been her who was sent to the cell, not me, but it might as well have been me: I have the same sentence, you see. I was given that sentence when I was born. A frail heart, they said. And I feel the sentence every minute, when listening to my heartbeat. Who was the judge? God? For what crime? For being human? Or was there a judge, or a reason at all?

But, then again, it is not just the girl sent to the cell, or me with my heart. We all have the same sentence, in different degrees. What was our crime, then, to be tortured in this way?

We are born every morning, full of hope, full of things to do during the day. Dozens of things, an infinitum of things, a universe of things. But so little we accomplish each day. Perhaps learn a thing or two, enjoy a little, suffer a little. But then comes the evening; we grow tired and pass away, and there will be no tomorrow.

To sleep? No! I haven't done everything yet! Not fair! No, what if I do not wake up tomorrow? No, I am not finished. Not fair. I do not want to be a whiner, because, fair or not, we cannot escape the inevitable. I succumb myself to the fate and close my eyes, like if I were waiting for an executor standing behind me to fire his pistol at my head. Gone forever. Right now. No, please not right now. Yes, right now. Not fair. To go away. Like those other people, turn cold and start to rot. And no, no, it is not just sleeping. There is no morning for that final sleep. No, forever that sleep will be. Not even dreaming will there be. So, no, it is not even sleep. It is nothing. It is not dreaming, or just sleeping, but reality, which has ceased to exist.

I lay in my bed, eyes half-open, remembering the nightmare I had. I do not always feel like this in the morning, if that is what you think of me. I feel like this sometimes, and usually only in the evening. The nightmare. I saw a glimpse of the spheres of time. Or whatever. That is not very common. The spheres, or whatever, are something important. They have always been my worst nightmare, but I can never understand them, and can never tell about them in words. They are like huge balls of wool that I wind. But they are not balls, but life, and winding a ball takes years and decades. And then I lose a ball, and have to reach for another one, years away. Years of space between the spheres, decades of darkness. But that is not it, and I cannot describe them with words, just analogies. But they are of time and space, that I know. Sometimes I remember the oppressive feeling for many minutes after I awaken, and it is unique. I saw the nightmares when I was a small child, usually when I was sick, shivering in fever. Once I was sitting in bathroom, in fever, having a nightmare of the spheres. But I was awake, kind of. My brother came to awaken me, bring me to the reality. I woke up, just a little. It was planets then, Earth, the Moon, Sun, and perhaps Jupiter. I'm not sure. Once I almost caught them, on a very warm summer night, waking in the middle of the night. I was laughing. I understood them, at least partly. It was so beautiful that I was laughing out loud like a madman. I was certain of grasping it finally, but then it slipped out again. I simply forgot it. I haven't seen the nightmare since that, actually.

Dreams, what else did I dream about? It is already slipping away. About seas, diving, space, the eternal darkness above me. A dream about an ocean, vast, eternal ocean. On a ship, large wooden ship, not moving anywhere. Deserted in the sea, abandoned, and taken over by people, peculiar people living there. They were dressed in rags, in furs, in waste. In a world and in a time far away in the past. And in the future. There is no real difference in time. It was winter in my dream. Cold, rough winter. The ship was enormous. Maybe it was not just a ship, but a city, floating in the ocean. But now a dead city. The deck painted in white, although the paint had now crackled, the deck frozen. Or maybe it was just ice and snow. So blinding white. I came to the ship from below, diving from somewhere. Perhaps from a submarine, or a spaceship, or both. Those are common themes for me. It is too hazy, sorry. I fall to the freezing sea, drown in the dark waters, die, and awaken. Why?

I die often, much more often than I see other people die. I see people denying the death, the inevitable. Men going to wars, thinking that THEY survive.

Is that not the greatest miracle of all? The fact that, every day, Death stalks, and everyone thinks He is coming for someone else. This is truly wonderful.

I lay there in my bed, looking up at the ceiling. The ceiling with dark red patterned wallpapers. The thoughts about the torture come back. I just wait, surrendered to the inevitable thoughts. I cry silently as the anguish grasps my consciousness. I squeeze my pillow slightly, as I stare at the white lace curtains, the morning sunlight streaming gently through the windows, silently. My fingers play tiredly with the lamp cord. So weary. So much to do. So many things to do. After a moment, I climb up.

Earthrange

I open up the doors in my bedroom, and walk to the garden in my white night dress. So peaceful here in the countryside. Grass, still wet from the morning dew, it tickles my bare, pale feet. I fill the watering can from the barrel below the gutterstick, water the pansies, the threads of life, and the knapweed. The pansies have grown enormously since I planted them here in May, now filling the house's side of the yard, making it look slightly like a moat filled with water, if you look at it from farther off.

My dark dream, it passes by again. It runs through the garden, transmuting it to a gray, withering scene, stopping everything for a moment, a frozen moment that feels like it might be eternal. I do not see where it goes then, my still weary eyes lose it from their feeble grasp. Perhaps it goes up the apple trees. But, where ever it went, I know it will come down in the evening again, or next morning.

I notice my old, small mirror that hangs in the wooden pole that supports the garden swing. The mirror wobbles slightly in the trifling morning breeze. Its silver has faded from too much polishing, and now it has become oxidized again. But somehow it reflects better than when I was young girl. No, perhaps not better; perhaps it is just so full of my older reflections that my image is now blurred. Did I say ''older''? No, I should not say ''older'' about the time when I was younger. Now I am older, not then. Funny words --- older, younger. Well, not ''old'' yet though; not so old, that I, or anyone else could call me ''old''. Just barely twenties. Just barely born, just barely not dead. Alive, though, I think.

I often talk with the old lady here. Sometimes she appears when I turn around, and see her sitting on the small bench. Sometimes I see only a glimpse of her when I look at the mirror. She moves so silently, so quickly, so merrily, although I never really perceive the movement. She tells me stories. Stories about the garden, about the forests around. She is my teacher, I might say. She says she lives here, and there in the forests and on the hill nearby. But I never see her inside the house. I do not even know her name, but somehow I do not feel like I would really have to know. Why is she like that, appearing and vanishing so ghostly? Other people do not do like that, so is she real? She is here, and that is enough for me. She reminds me slightly of my grandmother, but still is so different. She is so full of joy and life, which does not really fit the character of my grandmother. Well, she was very lovely too, in her own way. The old lady often wears a white lace scarf, looking somehow like a small girl with her childish smile. And so are her stories like children's stories, but I like them. They are more exciting than anything else I have ever heard.

The sun is good way climbing up in the east and a jay is twittering in a nearby alder, where he often is. I walk out of the small garden to the meadow that slopes down to the small brook some hundred yards away from my house. Well, not really my house. My grandmother lived here, and I did too with my parents when I was younger. But then I moved with my parents to the city and my grandmother died soon after that. My parents did not want to sell the house, but kept it as a summer home. Not that they ever really come here at summer, but instead go somewhere abroad. I started coming here some two years ago, just to keep it in a good shape, and because I like the peace and nature of the countryside. To be able to see days like this, as well as many other kinds of days. I like them all here, really. Except perhaps some of the nights and mornings, that are so strong in here.

I walk to a small bare hilltop nearby. I come here often; almost daily, I must say. From here I can see the house, the brook, and all the now abandoned meadows and forests around. The summer is really at its fullest, only a week after the equinox.

I stop at the hilltop and look at the sun. He dazzles me. I close my eyes and stop everything, just to feel. To bathe in the feeling.

I feel his warmth on my body, flowing through my translucent night-dress, as if he was touching me warmly with his life-giving hands, the rays of light. Just like in those ancient Egyptian stone carvings, where the sun's rays end in hands that each hold an ankh, the symbol of life. It feels relaxing and comforting, sweeping away the fears.

I just stand there, facing the sun with my eyes closed, my arms spread wide. My mind slips away, out of the hill, out of everything. Even the sun's touch fades to the background, as does the caressing warm southern breeze. There is just the nothingness, the caring arms of the divine mother, surrounding me, me surrounding me, me surrounding everything, everything which is nothing, nothing at all, empty void, she, me, and not even that, null, total nothingness, not even space, a singularity, a dot. I feel the horizon far far away, all around me, the periphery of myself, the circle of space, I am the circle; I am the dot that is the circle.

I open my eyes, and the divine light explodes in the void, filling it and giving birth to the wondrous scene which I see with my eyes. The meadows, the forests, the sky, the brook, the house. The squirrels in the forest, the grasshoppers in the meadow, the swallows in the sky, the roaches in the brook. I sense everything. I feel the scenery. I see it, I hear it, I smell it, I touch it, I taste it. I am it.

I look down to the earth beneath me, feeling with all my body her heavy gravitic embrace. Our mother. She is holding me on her lap, peacefully brushing my hair. I close my eyes again, and feel very comfortable. It feels just like when I was a child and she fed me with her milk. Her sweet thick milk streaming down, like the brook running down the valley. Filling me up, relaxing me. I sink into stasis. I feel an eternity passing through me. Everything is frozen in time, forever. All form stiffened, all forms of all forms in one image. There is no movement in that image, the image of the eternity, no point of now, nor a direction of tomorrow. Just all times, solid and secure. I freeze, my mind freezes.

The wind caresses my hair, bringing me fragrances from the forest and the hay fields far away. Again I feel the heat of our father, returning me to a certain point, a point in the eternity. He shows me a direction, a way back to the life. I start moving that way.

My consciousness slowly awakens as I return from the hill and step into my study. I let myself feel the space and form and being of the densely furnished, slightly disordered little room. The morning light, slowly climbing on the sky, is warming up the curtains and the air, arousing the cosy, peaceful atmosphere of the days of July. Piles and piles of things, so many things to do, to read, to understand. And I love all of those things more than anything.

Daydreaming

But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Or on the wealth of globed peonies; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. - John Keats, Ode to Melancholy, paragraph II

I puff into the sphere of my studies. "Let me see. What to do next?", I ponder. Yes, I will have to review my notes. "Where did I stop yesterday?", I ask myself. In something exciting, about life this time.

I make the careful gestures on my table, and my tea can fills with water and leaves. It warms up after I plug it into wall, and soon becomes empty as I pour it into my huge tea mug. "221b Baker Street", it reads in the blue-white china. I acquired it from a certain museum at that address. There is something deeply spiritual in that mug, with a figure of a man in the back side, the tenant who lived at that particular address. He is a godspirit to me, the spirit of inquiry, and thus a key to the world, to people, and to life. Yes, life.

Life is amazing, I ponder while sipping carefully from the mug. Life starts from a single cell, and then develops into complex and strange creatures like me and the person who made the tea mug, and the tea itself. Yes, that is something wonderful. It is also so very shame that often we do not even want to understand life or its beauty. Instead, we attribute that beauty to something that does not exist. We are children of the Nature, and as usual, children are blind to the beauty of their parents.

In the old days, we could not see inside the matter. We did not even know about cells, but just though of ourselves as some strange mass. As we could not understand our bodies and cells as intricate machines, and could not give any other explanation, we thought that there would be some separate ''life-spirit'' or ''life-force'' guiding our bodily masses. And even when we were shown what the cells are, we wanted to cling to those fantasies, upon which we had so unfortunately built our world view. The world view, which would collapse if the separate spirit was removed from beneath it, and take so many of our desperate dreams with it.

We value our mind, our intuition, and what we call spiritual values. We admire wisdom and spirituality, and indulge ourself into deep contemplations. There is nothing wrong with that, because intellect is what we humans are. We are an intellect emerging from our brain, the trillions of complex cells that compute our consciousness. The activation fields and patterns spurting rhytmically in the neural fabric, quickly evolving to clear associations and vague concepts. There is no need for forces separate from our bodies, not any longer. Spirit is matter, and thus when we value our spirituality, we should also admire the deep beauty of the highly evolved and self-organized matter from which it emerges.

The swift and volatile intuition is the beast of burden of our intellect. It creates our imagination, it creates every single conception we have. And the finest manifestation of intuition is the razorblade of rationality. It is the rationality which refines and nourishes the intuition, by peeling the bad parts off, shaping it to something even more powerful. Intuition and rationality are not opposites, but two reciprocally dependent agents of collaboration. Two parts that are essential to what we are, and how we grow up. We must never despise nor discard either.

I think, I imagine, I feel. Those images and feelings swirl in my chaotic mind. I wade in a dark swamp of the chaos, feeling my way, searching for something solid, something orderly. Thoughts and knowledge are so very hard to grasp, and when I believe I can get hold of something, it dissolves like mud in the rain. I get tangled in the net of my spurting thoughts. I fall on my knees, frustrated. If I only found something solid, something to hold on to.

We are afraid of living in the damp darkness. We cry in the frustration, trying to create the solid land only with our wishful words. We speak a lot, and imagine even more than that. Or perhaps we do not even imagine, perhaps we just speak. We speak of dreams and truths and miracles. We speak of a religious revelation, a legendary solid haven in the dark wet world. This religion seems to be a very important subject to us. I guess I understand that.

Religion. What is that, really? It is, again, a matter of belief and a matter of spirit. Sometimes it is believing in spirit rather than matter. But I am, myself, very fond of the spirit that emerges from that matter, the matterly mother of spirit. Spirit matters, as much as matter does. I know very few facts, but I can experience the spirit, and thus know it exists before anything else. And that experience of the spirit tells me about the matter that lies somewhere in the other side of the experience. The spirit tells me about my body, about my mind emerging from that body, and about the spirit itself. It might all be a dream, but then everything might be a dream. If it were, I would be writing this to just my solipsed self. But, I choose to make a presumption and believe in the spirit, and therefore I also believe in the matter that lies under the spirit. Thus, if I do have a religion, it is a religion of the matter and the nature, in all their mundane divinity.

Nevertheless, religion, I guess, is important to us. Through it, we try to connect with that legendary solid land, even if we could never grasp it with our own hands. Even when we are there, in the dark, daemon-haunted swamp, drowning in mud, we can imagine that we really live in a solid world. We create an illusionary experience, to settle our restless fears. But as the experience is so pleasant, we often give up to it, lose our direction to the real ground, but drown, and sometimes take others with us.

We love our experiences, and sometimes stray into believing that all of them tell of something real outside our minds. Unfortunately, they do not, they are only imagination. We can imagine visions and sounds and touches and other feelings. We experience things and forces and beings, but although they can be very powerful experiences, they are just that, experiences, not perceptions. We must not forget that, and succumb into wishful thinking that we have found some loophole escape from the darkness. The experiences are created by the most marvellous virtual reality engine there is, our mysterious mind. They are one kind of reality, as dreams are their own reality, but they do not all come from that One Reality that lies beyond the experiences.

So important are the dreams that we sacrifice the only life we have for living in them. We give up the search in the dark and succumb. For what? For one dream in one imagined world. Just wanting to feel happy and satisfied. Craving for the pleasure which the addictive drug brings us. On dope for life.

It is funny. I have always enjoyed good literature, mostly fantasy and science fiction. I have all my life been running in most glorious and peculiar worlds, far away in time and space. I have seen things some people would not believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near Tan Hauser Gate.

The are so many worlds that give us ideas, but some of us live in just one. They live in this one dream which they want to be the reality. But no, no no, I am not talking about the rationalists, who are genuinely obsessed with finding the one solid ground in the dark, but about those who want to live in their dreams. They live in that one dream, one virtual reality, perhaps occasionally changing the film. It is an illusion they want to live in, because illusions feel exciting and pleasant and conceal the underlying angst. What they do not like, they throw out of their heaven, and lock themselves up for the rest of their lives, until they drown in the mud.

Death. Among dreams, there is one dream that is the greatest, and that is to escape Death, our ever-haunting nightmare. Death must be the key of religions, or actually a contradictory chain of keys, as there are more views of death than there are religions. Many religions offer a belief that some essence of ourselves survives bodily death, a belief which is perhaps the most comforting of all spiritual doctrines. Solace provided by any sort of expectation of an afterlife has always been sufficient to assure its undiminished popularity all by itself.

I had a good friend when I was younger, Sarah was her name. We went to school together, and stayed together for almost fifteen years, chattering about almost every detail of our lives and thoughts. Then she went to see her brother who studied in Liverpool. She went there with her mother who had a car. There was a bus. The driver of that approaching bus was just about to doze off. Snap.

It feels so unfair, so unjust. Therefore, we often want to find justice and believe in the ''just world hypothesis'', the soothing notion that, in life, people generally get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Many of us rebel emotionally at the realization -- easily prompted by a quick glance at the daily headlines -- that the plums and brickbats of life seem to be somewhat randomly apportioned, morally speaking. Apparently, it is too threatening for a large portion of us to admit that, no matter how long and hard we have tried to do the right thing, the driver of that approaching bus could still be just about to doze off.

So, some say that it was just for my friend to die. They say that she, she who had never harmed anyone or anything, she deserved it. They may even think that because in some ''past life'' she had done something bad, so now this most innocent friend was killed. Or that some sadistic God killed her because some ancient ancestor had eaten some apple. Can you believe that? Well, many of us do. No, there was no justice in what happened to my friend. If someone says so, it is an insult against her and our memory of her. It is an insult against everything good that she was.

Is she really dead? When she was alive, I saw her often, at the very least every week. I still remember her as clearly as I did when she was alive. She is not here any longer, but she might as well be, so well I remember her. So is she dead? To me she is not, not as long as I remember her.

Her death was significant. She is gone, but some say that she is not. But she is. We often try to believe that dead people are not really gone forever, because we want to deny the painful truth, we want to deny the loss. But denying the loss is denying the significance. For my friend, denying the loss would be denying her sacrifice. It is an insult against the meaning of her death. It is an insult against Nature to praise something that does not exist. It is like praising a character in a book to be wise, instead of giving the credit to the writer.

We want answers. Why is there death? Because, however odd it may sound, death is that which creates life. Death is our mother and father, our creator. Death is the spinner of the Wheel of Life, the potter's wheel of Egyptian god Khnum or Ptah. Revolving as the years and generations go by, those earthly cycles of birth and death. It is the evolutionary potter's wheel on which we were fashioned by the hand of the Reaper. Without Death, there would be no life. All life grows and multiplies, but it is the hand of the Reaper that decides which are selected to be parents of the future generations, and which are not.

But we still want answers. Why do we age, why do we live just about a hundred years or so, why cannot we live forever? Some small organisms can, actually, live forever, and die only in accidents and in hunger. But those organisms do not evolve so well. Death was an invention, an invention of our blind Mother some milliards of years ago. It is a way to speed the evolution, the spinning of the Wheel of Life. Timed death competed and fought against the eternal life, and won it, as it was better in creation of life than the immortality.

Death is the greatest gift that every one of us can give to humanity, the gift that our mothers and fathers have given to us. A gift that was not given to us to be kept, but to be passed along.

We cling on to some hopeless dreams. The power of dreams is strong, for it is, again, the power of fear, of sadness. We can always escape from the reality to the dreams. We can escape to stories of eternal life, stories of rescue, stories of migrating souls. We can escape and never awaken.

The daemons, the dark-winged daemons haunting this world, they live there in our dreams. They feed from our fears and horrors. They give us comfort, while they wrap their winghides around our eyes, obscuring any light that would help us to see what they really are like.

But no, if we were to see the daemons, they would not be horrible, but beautiful, although in a different way. I love them. I feel so comfortable when I visit them. I walk among them, and rest in their strong arms and breasts. But they are my friends and lovers, not masters. I know where they are, and they have learned not to force me, but to respect me. That is a good quality in a lover, as well as in a friend. Not to force, not to blind, not to abuse one's love. But just to love and honor.

What we need is an army of holy paladins to fight the darkness. And not just the knights, but every soldier fighting on the field matters, as without them the heroes would be ran over by the fanatic masses of the enemy. Every one of us can be a holy warrior, if we just choose our weapons well. We need the razor-sharp sword of reason and the shield of wisdom. We need scales to weigh our beliefs, and to judge rights and wrongs. And to conquer the dark dungeons of nightmares, we need a candle of intellectual light, and a looking-glass to concentrate that light, to reveal the minute details of Nature. We need the candle to shed light on our path in this daemon-haunted world. Without that flickering flame, we and the humanity would be lost in the dark.

Darkness falls

She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung. - John Keats, Ode to Melancholy, paragraph III

It is evening, the sun has already gone down in the western horizon. Much time has passed since the morning, the morning of my life. I have grown old. I sit on the meadow just outside my garden. The grass under my bare feet is freezing cold, as the water evaporates and chills it. The sky is so deep dark blue, so incredible. The air is almost perfectly still, although I can at times feel a slight breeze quivering the delicate hair in my arm. So silent it is. Only sound breaking the silence is some bats spurting occasionally from tree to tree, and to and from my broken attic window. Nights like this are really what life is at its best. Your mind stops, and you descend into deep feeling of unity with the night. You forget the injustice in the world, forget all the grimsome deaths, forget the cries of all the million hungry children. They are not crying here tonight. No, perhaps they are now resting peacefully in their mothers' arms. On some meadow here in England. On a meadow in France. In Italy. In Africa. After some hours in America, then far in the East, Japan, China, on the mountains of Himalaya, on the valleys of Ganges, Eufrat and Nile. And tomorrow here again. Perhaps with me, perhaps not. So what? I mean, so what if I will not wake up again tomorrow morning, and not sit here tomorrow evening? The evening, with which I feel like being one, is still here, even without me. The evening is not a dream. The evening does not die with me. It does not die with the France, Italy, Africa, or the other places. The sky is there always. Perhaps the stars are there too for a very long time. Perhaps my apple trees will die. Yes, that is very probable. But there will be other apple trees, just as old and as fine and as fragrant as these ones. Perhaps the bats will die, perhaps the sun will die. Perhaps the French, Italians, Africans and others will fly up there among the stars, taking the apple trees and bats with them, planting them again under another sky, under another sun. Dreams, of future. I think they are all I have, all that is precious to me. All my dreams. What will happen to them? No, they won't be there. They will be forgotten, just as easily as I usually forget them every morning. All the imagination of people. Those attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Tan Hauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Perhaps some of my dreams will come true. Perhaps they will build that submarine, that huge floating city that freezes together with the earth. Perhaps they will build those glorious citadels among the stars. Perhaps our ships will fall down from the night skies of other worlds, bringing those worlds into a new age of unprecedented beauty. On world with sun, or two. With moon, or many. That is why dreaming is important, after all. Now I must go to sleep. I take a glimpse at the old mirror hanging by the swing. There is barely any silver left. The mirror was never of very good quality, anyways, I must say. I can not even tell how old I am anymore. When I look at the mirror, I see myself. Not as a young girl, or what I might be now, but just myself. All what I have been between then and now. I am there, in the reflection. I am the reflection. The reflection is dark, dark like space, dark like my blurred thoughts, dark like everything I see. It is getting dark, and I had better get in, to sleep. I lay down, and I smile. I would like to laugh, but that might be overdoing it. So I just smile. I smile enthusiastically at the biggest tragedy I have ever seen, but which I might not see after all. It is just my luck; the tragedy can not come when I am awake, because that would be too much fun. Yes, tomorrow. This has been a wonderful day, and I have learned so much. I have not even had time to write everything down. This time I really didn't know how to, because I discovered something really wonderful today, something which had never come to my mind ever before. I think it is the most beautiful finding that I have ever made, which really says it all. But I could not really know how to turn it into words earlier, so I guess I have to leave it for tomorrow morning. So once again, I close my eyes. Good night, Universe, my eternal love. Time to die.

(C) Copyright 2000 by Kiandra (kiandra42@yahoo.com)

(Some other [not marked!] excerpts and quotations from various other sources).