A Waking World

III. Inside The Sphere

1. Polarity

It wasn't that he had been pretending to be better, it was a more like a willful self delusion. Tim sat up in his bed, making sure not to stir the sleep of his sleeping angel Vicky. Catatonically he stared ahead,  watching as the sunset crept from the horizon towards his window. He stared and wondered if the fading gloom he had just witnessed could be more than just a symbolic death to the night, and if the rising sun was a reincarnation of the previous dawn. We take for granted the daily cycles of both; but are there not places where night lasts for weeks and daylight in turn lives on just as long? Could there not therefore be a reality where they day and night would truly be dead to those who worshiped them? Then, only through dance and ritual might the sun and moon be reborn. This illusion of causality nonetheless gives life to these symbols, just like his waking thoughts were giving his nightmares a life outside their unconscious domain.

The truth was, Tim had forgotten the contents of his old and terrible dreams. This was profoundly more troubling to his mind, to not know the face of his enemy. He insisted that the memories didn't haunt him any longer, but the beings that currently stalked his sleep had to be more than just ignorant fears. Of this he was sure, and he wondered if the hellish episode he had just experienced was indeed the same sort which plagued him years ago. All he could remember of those days was  haphazard montages of delirious conversations and nothing but panic and disillusionment.

There were moments of uniting clarity. He remembered meeting Vicky, the new girl in town. She was walking down the stairs of Westerburg High School quickly and nervously pacing about her new enviornment. It was as he glanced up from the base of the main common staircase that Tim caught sight of her stifling beauty. Caught off guard by a dreamy eyed stranger below her, her feet suddenly voiced a spastic disagreement with each other, sending her stumbling clumsily down the stairs, arms flailing, and into Tim's arms. Above their accidental embrace her school papers rained down like over sized confetti. It was a story they always told, and so it was a fateful love from the start.

There she was with eyes glowing like jade colored crystals, the perfect adornments for her pretty almost feline nose. Her lips whispered softness and when pressed into a smile even beckoned sweetness. She was perfection if there could be such a thing. To Tim's wonder, she felt the same way about him, and like roses in spring their love blossomed into an unbreakable and beautiful thing.

2. Polarity Times Polarity

The same day of his uninvited but cherished courtship, Tim came home to the news of his mother's impending death. Her recent distress had all but disintegrated during the days monumental events. Nancy Feller had been in and out of the hospital for weeks prior, plagued by sharp and piercing migraines and cerebral throbbings. After various blood tests and brain scans, it was determined by her physician that the pain must all be in her head. Of course, husband James Feller took to this diagnosis with a resentful but victorious I shoulda known attitude. Ever since their first attempts, during their still youthful marriage, to conceive a child were riddled with miscarriages, James grew increasingly and uncharacteristically domineering. He took her miscarriages as a sign of weakness accusing her of not really wanting a baby and of stupid selfishness. His senseless bitterness persisted even when  fifteen years later, after they had both eliminated the thought of having a child, they decided to try again, each for their own comfort's sake. After a tension filled nine and a half months of what could have been borderline captivity Nancy gave birth to a healthy brown-eyed baby of exactly seven pounds and six ounces. James, instead of being relieved as he hoped to be, pitied himself with the thoughts of having a child at his fleeting age of 49. only managed to empower James' invidious snowball of misery.

Nancy did not, could not, believe that this was all in her mind. SHE felt the PAIN, felt it like a score of needles pierced her skull in agitated successions. Sometimes her head burned like a wildfire, spreading from a single point where the pressure fell in piercing cycles. This is what a stabbing feels like she thought. From there the pain raced through her neural highways, building itself into a sun begging to erupt. After the supernova in her head would settle, she was left reeling on the outskirts of consciousness in a blur of delirium.