Traveller

Lately I have been stuck in this place between asleep and awake where I cannot differentiate between dreams and memories, or gossip and plotlines.  I only realise I am finally alert when my heart smarts, my throat closes and tears gather.  The brutality of my reality is too much.   

Sometimes I wonder whether I will ever have clear memories that are my own, not those I have accidentally imported from others, their thoughts and feelings bleeding into my subconscious.  Now and then, when talking, I will go to recall something that has happened recently, only to realise that the memory is in fact the bastard love child of my true memory and several potential alternate world fathers.  I get so confused that my memory infuses the two realities and recalls plot points from storylines as though they were my own.  

So, often, I wish to stay in that other world immersed in the rich, colourful reality of those characters. My world by comparison is bland, black and white with rough, angry, senseless streaks of red.  In the other world, time passing, the morning sun, the darkening night, the day of the week… it is of no consequence.  It is a safe place where I feel anything is still possible.  Here, in this world the merging and passing of time is marked by signposts of grief.  I watch my god-daughter become a young woman and realise that before long she will have left her childhood behind.  I watch my friends get married, fall pregnant, buy houses, start new careers while I am stagnant, in a waking coma.

I am here in my bubble, floating between two realities, an outsider and voyeur of both worlds, but never really a part of either.  In this territory between the two are the soul travellers, the interlopers.  We cannot physically explore the world, so instead we observe, and imagine and hope. 

One day I hope to be a resident somewhere other than this territory; but in the mean time I will take comfort from other soul travellers, share their war stories and feel them walking beside me even though I cannot see them.