The Lost Realm

I feel like my life is unwinding. It isn’t unwinding in a bad way; it’s just trying to rediscover itself, the way that it was five or six years ago. I find myself wanting to go to return to the places I was at, make contact with the people I knew, and reconnect with the life that I left behind. A life that would have been.

I went for a walk through the university today. Everything was so familiar, and yet so different. It has moved on while I have been away. The buildings are changed, new, altered. The tiny saplings that were there so many years ago have become towering trees that now rival the buildings for the sky.

And yet I feel like I have gone nowhere. Certainly, I have journeyed and I have grown, but I have followed a path that leads to a dead end. How can I prove my journey now that I must go back to where I was? How can I claim my portion of the sky now that I must find a new path to make my own?

You know that lovely feeling you get when you’ve just changed the sheets; that wonderful “clean sheets” feeling when you first climb into bed and feel the crisp, cool sheets against your skin?

That feeling isn’t as fun when there’s no one to share it with.

At the moment, my life is full of those clean sheet moments. I go about my daily business: work, eat, sleep. I encounter the daily joys, the sort that normally tickle the soul, but they seem to have had all the magic sucked out of them. All the added life and energy that new lovers suddely discover in their world has been removed from mine, and I find that the world isn’t so exciting and vibrant as it once was.

Even so, clean sheets are still nice.

As a child, I had one particular dream more times than I could count. It started long before I can remember. I’d always had this dream. It was black — dark and infinite — I couldn’t tell if I was still or moving or falling. There were images of white: skulls, ghosts, spirits, and I’m not sure what else. The flew past me, gazing at me, mouths agape. Horrible visions. I could hear my heart beating. Louder and louder.

But it wasn’t the darkness or the images or the heart beat that I focussed on. No, there was a particular feeling. Not an emotional feeling, but a real, physical feeling. It was all I could think of.

At first, I had no idea what it was. Then, over the years, I pieced it together. It was something between my fingers. Grasped firmly and massaged between the index, middle finger and thumb of my right hand. Always the same fingers, grasping and feeling at something. That something was the ring finger of my left hand. Right where a wedding ring would be. Grasping through the skin and muscle to the very bone.

My first girlfriend thought it might have been a left-over from a previous life. A memory of something lost. A longing for the wedding ring I no longer bore.

Tonight I was sitting here, and I found myself with a spooky, familiar feeling. My index, middle finger and thumb were grasping at my left ring finger. Where my wedding ring has been, but sits no longer. Not for days now.

I think I finally understand that dream. Those feelings.

I have lost something, and I feel those images, those daemons, flying past me again in the darkness. I understand them, and that they have always been a part of me, waiting to return. Now that they’re here, they are again eclipsed by a feeling. A certainty of loss and absence.

My childhood dream has become real, and I find myself wishing that I could just wake up.