SO
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Laying on my bed, fingers curled into my hair, I flip through the pages of one of the scrapbooks from the stack on my nightstand. Images of familiar faces in settings I don’t recognize flit before me, experiencing emotions I don’t understand but can’t deny. Lives that seems so alien, intangible.
The papers and layouts, chosen with such care, give details of tales that are stored in my body memory, yet inaccessible without this external trigger. Like a gun, it fires holes in my perception, filling the room with the smoke of yesterday and stinging my eyes until they tear. Letters, interspersed with the photographs, scribble out excitement I cannot share, sorrows that fail to tug at my heart. I reach out and trace the lines, trying to feel some lingering bit of the spirits that wrote them. The connection has been lost to time; they are now just cold words on a page.
Sighing, I roll over and look out the window. Night has fallen but the streetlight in front of the house blocks out the twinkle of the stars. The tattered lace curtains suggest the outline of a form against the window frame, ghost image of one of the inhabitants of the photographs, but then I move and the thought disappears. I feel the sudden, desperate need to feel the starlight and the bite of the cool spring night air on this flesh. The sleeping dogs lift their heads in interest as pass them, moving swiftly through the small, time-weary house. I grab my keys off the dingy kitchen counter and rush out the back door to the car that waits like a stallion, impatient to be ridden.
I know where I’m going. I’ve been there before, but as someone else. Something calls every cell of my being to this spot, magnetically. I take the same route she did, but with more care. I would walk there, but I don’t know any way except this high-speed road full of twists. I revel in the thrill of the sharp circle turn that takes me westward, my foot willing itself to press harder on the petal toward the more daring speed my predecessor required to feel alive. My nerves and muscles become alert for the outward force the turns of the road exert on the less cautious. I will myself to lighten up on the pedal, to go at a more sane speed, though there really is no point. Mine is the lone car on the road at this hour, just as it was that other night. Every sense is reliving the experiences, though it is less bitterly cold tonight. The bitterness is internal now. I wonder briefly if the taste in my mouth will ever change as I pull off the exit ramp and into the parking lot for the pier.
Leaving the car behind me, I walk up the solid concrete stairs and toward the cold metal railing, stopping under one of the main over-head lanterns. The lights of Cleveland’s skyline play in friendly competition with the brilliance of the stars over the grand lake. For a brief second I think I feel the waves below slapping across my face, angrily telling me to turn back and remember the lessons this form has already been taught, but I shrug it off. That’s not why I’m here tonight anyway.
“Hello, Artemis.” Her voice carries a metallic tone of boredom instead of the tinkle of bells it used to bear.
“Hello, Euryphaessa,” I respond with a slight bow of my head.
When I look up again, she is scrutinizing me. “You are not here to end your existence.” Her tone is matter-of-fact, not a question. “Have you found what you came here for?”
I turn my gaze back to the stars. Ghost-lights from thousands of years past play upon my eyes, dilating them enough that I experience a slight pain when I turn my gaze back to the brighter light bathing my companion.
“I don’t know what I was looking for,” I finally reply. “Does the dream exist beyond the dreaming?” An owl hoots from a nearby tree as we share silence. “If all we do is dream, do we exist at all?”
“Tales are built upon dreams of men, my dear,” she replies.
“But what use are tales?”
“They tell us who we are, the tales we tell of ourselves and others. They give our lives shape and meaning.”
“And what if we decide we don’t like those tales any more?” There is a sourness in my throat as these words rise on the frigid air.
“Worse, what if everyone stops telling the tales you know to be true?”
It is my turn to scrutinize, and I notice subtle differences. The gold of her hair has faded, not to silver but to a dull grey. The light that shone from her eyes in all the tales we used to tell has gone out.
“Your stories are still told,” I counter.
“Stories are still told, but they are not my stories. My name is used, but to describe a being I have never met, with desires completely foreign to my own.” She grips the railing, white-knuckled, and then looks me in the eye again. “Your stories still bear some resemblance to the girl I knew.” Her hand rises to my cheek, almost of its own accord, and the touch is as cold and insubstantial as the breeze.
“Euryphaessa -”
“My time has ended. I cannot even answer the call of my own name with the surety that it is I who is called. May your time continue, my child.”
With these last words, her arms rise to the heavens, the lantern above us sputters out, and she falls forward toward the waiting waves. When I can finally bear to look down, there is a glimmer upon the surface, glittering like flakes of gold. I blow a kiss to her memory and walk back toward the car, somehow unable to shed even a single tear.
The drive home is slower, reverent, a solitary funeral procession for Euryphaessa. I drive toward the shining spectacle of downtown, around the flirtatious curves of the highway as it follows the lake, past steaming smoke stacks of industry and the iridescent glow of the hospital and back to my home on Castle Avenue.
Once I am securely inside again and the dogs have been acknowledged to their satisfaction, I return to my bedroom. Instead of the scrapbooks, kneal beside the bed and I reach for a box hidden beneath. Opening it cautiously, I rifle through the contents, carefully set aside the delicate carbon-duplicates of hospital discharge papers, slightly crumpled bills, and some bland greeting cards mostly saved for the return addresses on their envelopes. My objective lies at the bottom, and sticks slightly to the elderly box, resisting my efforts. A delapitated diary, looking as if it has had several episodes of violence inflicted upon it, finally sits in my lap. I open it gently, but dispite my caution, a page falls partway out. I turn to it and feel submerged in the psyche of the woman who penned the words.
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