Dreamscape

Every night I enter the land where I am both born and dying, where time is neither time nor timeless, but the pause between heartbeats. Here, the dead teach calculus to unborn children, and my grandmother peels apples with tomorrow's knife, each spiral of skin rising into yesterday's light. Time is a broken compass spinning backward toward the first word God forgot to speak— that syllable which holds all weather, all seasons, the memory of snow before winter learned to fall. I become the echo of my mother's pulse before her heart knew my name, before name knew the weight of being, before being learned to forget itself. When dawn arrives with its cargo of erasure, its liturgy of light, I surface holding only the shape of loss— that perfect sphere where all our unlived lives press against the membrane of what we dare to call real, what we dare to call home, what we dare to call ourselves. 27 JUL 2025