Where There Are Fireflies
A short piece by Aiden Bemo
When the consciousness of my mind slips from existence, I become aware of the fireflies that surround my sleeping tomb. As my body succumbs to the eternal peace that follows sleep, I feel the light bodies of the floating flames touch the skin of my corpseās mind. Without control, my soul drifts. The barriers between the outside world and the life created within the human brain collapse, leaving nothing but the open reality that holds the imagination of a made up world. Calculations, meditations, and revelations consume the mind, altering the presence of the real world and creating the vast reality we call a dream. The dream is a world some prefer to the living and breathing. Words canāt express what my mind creates to fulfill the empty void of my sleeping brain. Itās a beautiful combination of life and the lack thereof. A jump from a peaceful, blue fantasy to a dark, fear-feasting lagoon takes place within my subconscious. This vast darkness is what the mind would call a nightmare. Oneās beautiful alternate universe crumbles to dust leaving a horror-filled world created to inject fear into the minds of its victims. Crawling creatures and mumbling monsters roll into a reality of terror, screaming, aching, quaking, scaring the innocent and the guilty, for this reality lives within us all. Itās an inescapable world that exists purely to haunt us.
Within my nightmare, she lives. The world evolves into a horror that contains her. Itās inescapable, inevitable, ineluctable, and it holds me hostage. As I stare with dead eyes, she shows me the terrors of the past, a flashback which only brings pain. Whilst Iām stuck in place, the tears swell in my unconscious eyes. I see flashes. I see red. I see black, and then I see nothing. Sheās all soā¦ incomprehensive. Why would my mind do this to me? Why would the brain destroy the heart with images and visions of mistakes and regrets that have shaped one to be the person they are today? It is a guilt littered with shame and topped with a cherry we call sorrow. Surely the overbearing guilt of mistakes canāt turn any human into a monster. As one would ask this question, the answer would be unclear.
This sunken palace is not where there are fireflies. No, the joyous light they emit has been extinguished, and the dark presence of guilt has buried its roots deep. When guilt gets to someone, they break into millions of tiny shattered pieces, and within those pieces lives that shame. The fireflies have left this place and Iām not sure when they will come back. They will be back eventually. Surely they canāt be gone foreverā¦