〘Ͻ〙 In my dream, there is a man. A man who is a Door but Not a Door, in a House that is Not a House, on a Lake that is Not a Lake. A man that is a Dreamer but he is Wide A/Wake. A man that is full of Guilt. Regret. Pain. A Torchbearer.
Lost. You hear our words but you forget, push your fingers through the surface to the wet--
The House is not a House. It's a Tree. The World Tree. A Pillar. Yggdrasil. The Tree is Fractured. The Roots are Infected. The Shadows. The Hiss. Earworm humming in a dream, baby baby yeah, just plastic--
The man is lost in the Dark. A Copy of a Copy of a Copy of a Copy you are Home, you remind us, happy, hurt--
The Poet, the Writer, the Filmmaker. Who came first, the chicken or the Egg? The Egg cracks and the truth will emerge out of you--
I'm drowning, Tom. I'm scared. I didn't fall--The Scratching Hag in the House of Dreams, Someone Else to Dream me Free. Beyond the shadow you settle for, there is a miracle illuminated.
The picture is you holding the picture.
When you hear this you will know you’re the new you.
There are times where Zane's hold on the narrative gets shaky. The little pocket that he's carved out for himself alongside-- but only slightly intersecting-- the Hero's Journey starts to fade out. Melt down from the heat of the lamp, grown holes and split, leaving the projector sputtering with nothing to illuminate.
And then everything flickers, goes dark, and leaves him alone with the smell of brine and an old emotion pushing outward against his rib cage like it will kill him for good this time.
It's not real. Of course. None of it is real.
The words that reach Zane from the dark and sink into his skull like grasping fingers have just a glimmer of familiarity to them. Humming an old song that he hadn't heard for decades after being reminded by a phrase. And the last time he had heard anything other than the chorus, she had been there in her lace, fabric fluttering like wings. Her fingers around the back of his neck.
Guilt.
"I'm not lost," Zane insists, voice echoing out to nowhere and to no one.
"I know exactly where I am."
And then the lights flicker back on, light up the space in dull oranges to make it moody. Chill.
Zane is everything but. Breathing hard and glancing around the room with wild eyes in a search for the source of the disturbance. A who, a what, a fucking when, even--
The tv static sputters too bright for how bright the room already is. There might be someone in the doorway, more like a light burn than an actual image. A bald man. The ginger woman from the tv.
"I don't like these accusations you're tossing around here, man," Zane says. There is nowhere out but the window and he's already tangled in the words like lake weeds in dark, wet hair.
You don't want to be.
But someone made a mistake along the way, and he's here now snorting lines and drowning boredom in booze while he tries to urge the exit open. Something else came knocking, apparently.
"I think you're lost. I'm not a lifeguard I'm a..."
Diver. Poet. Filmmaker. Killer.
Zane flickers in place. The camera's in his hands now and he raises it like a weapon.
"Go back to wherever you came from because what you're looking for is not here, I promise."
