Between Here and There

[PrttyBrd]

It's hard enough to sleep, even more so to sleep deeply enough to dream. With a worn out mind, exhausted, I stumble to bed. Fleeting images race by my mind's eye, just bits and pieces, bits and pieces. Lips in black and white. I've seen them before, like a close up snapshot. Familiar. I can almost feel their warmth, their softness and strength. Whose are they? Warm breath escapes them with the slightest of sighs. So enticing.Then, there is an eye. Just one. In a shade of blue that seems almost man made. How can something so beautiful really exist without personal enhancement? A plastic thought in a plastic world. A thought for another time. Long eyelashes blink once, twice. It sees my soul, and as I drift off I can feel the wetness on my cheek. Not conscious enough to connect the dots, just awake enough to know that I am naked. My inner-self gazed upon with an equally naked eye. The eye of a stranger so familiar that I ache to see the face to which it belongs. Bare, vulnerable, and ...free. The tear is cold in the night air as it dries upon my cheek.Though undoubtedly I must dream deeply, that is all that remains by morning. Those few brief images and a feeling. A sense of acceptance in spite of faults. A lightness that emphasizes the weight that I was unaware that I carry. The freedom to soar high above myself, above the self that I see every day, above who I have caged myself into. In that brief precursor to slumber, have I found truth? I can't help but wonder if they were subconscious clues to enlightenment. Perhaps they are the foyer to pathways of introspection that I have yet to explore. Still, I find myself struggling to hold on to that minuscule feeling of liberation of self.Evermore present is the sense that I must know the person who holds the key to my escape. My conscious mind assumes that I hold the key myself. Alas, my eyes are brown like the Earth and not blue like the sky. Those lips, full and warm, too are not my own. As I fight to place these parts into logical places, I realize that there is no place for logic here. I must loosen my grasp on what reality claims to be, on my stern perceptions of what may and may not be. I must stop analyzing and realize that there is hope that I can release myself from whatever is binding. I felt it. It is the reality I choose to believe exists.I close my eyes and try to go back to that place. That place where worries no longer exist. That place inside myself that ignores tension and releases stress. The memory is still fresh and the feeling, though fleeting, still exists. I fear that, before long I will not be able to relive it so easily, that I will, in an effort to find that peace in my conscious life, eradicate its very existence.