Dream Chasers

The Alchemist

The secret is this, The Alchemist smiled, “Every day you awake to a world that is brand new. All history, memories, and expectation are just scenery left on the stage from yesterday’s play. You don’t have to play that part today. Its only authority rests in our unspoken agreement to buy-in to the illusion. So, reject the script, hoist the scenery back into the flies, and play any part you wish. Why not play yourself?”

Alone again in the tent he laughed to himself, “Wait until you learn that you can step off the stage and leave the theatre entirely.”

The Space Between Spaces

The breeze came like a choral song susurrating through the branches and the leaves of the fir forest. A gold and amber aura pulsing like ocean phosphorescence where the uppermost branches brushed the bruised sky with their leaves.

Here the land was whole… untouched. Here the Sky still lay close to his primordial lover, Gaea, and the air hung thick and heavy with magic.

Here where the trees knew my soul name and greeted me like an old familiar though I had not yet met them in this life. Here where I last saw you, in the space between spaces.

 

The Librarian

He got a part-time job at the library. It was the only way he could track and access all the books she read.

He had to hope that he could map her imagination and follow her footsteps through stories, and tales… places her mind dwelt in wonder. And just maybe, somehow, in a dusty side street in Cairo, or on the pebbled shore of an emerald lake in an exotic land, their minds would bump into each other.

And that through some law of attraction or entanglement their bodies would follow suit in this dying town where nothing ever happened.

A Theoretical Physicist Writes a Love Letter

It comforts me that time does not exist as we perceive it. It comforts me that there is no passage of time, only an eternal now, only the EveryWhen. So, while I sit alone in this moment, somewhere in the EveryWhen your head rests on my chest in an eternal moment.  

Somewhere in the EveryWhen this is the moment I see you for the first time. The moment you hold my gaze from across the room for five seconds longer than ‘just a friend’ would. The moment I feel your breath on my mouth in that perfect pause before our first kiss…

This is the moment it all starts to fall apart; and the moment we break each other’s hearts…

But this is also the moment, decades from now, when we meet again, in the most random of circumstances imaginable.
In the EveryWhen this is the moment. And altogether it is beautiful.

And so, I wish upon fragments of ancient light from long dead galaxies, consigning my heart to the EveryWhen where all fires burn eternal.

Drabble 3: Diary Excerpt from an Alternate Durban

I watched a car jump a red robot – thinking it could outrun it. No one outruns a red robot.

By the time I left for the station some Indian Miners were pulling the last of the wreckage down through the tar. The robot, now green, was playfully shooing children away from the street as the afternoon traffic poured into the city. The Hadedactyles were soaring high now, lazily. The onshore wind was picking-up, boding well for a quick trip by sail-train to Maritzburg. The train may be crowded, but at least you don’t have to worry about red robots.

Drabble 2: Be. Here. Now.

There is a battle raging. The legions of distraction lay siege to the ancient crumbling fortress of The Present. The veteran cohorts of breeze and birdsong, silence and solitude desperately hold formation against the massed ranks of screens bearing down on them. If The Present should fall we will lose the “here and now”. The void will be filled by simulacra of “the good life” and we, the living dead, will walk the earth. Never seeing all we have lost, for the screen in front of our faces. If you read this it may already be too late for you.