Things Lost to Time
04/05/2024
***Disclaimer: This story was inspired by a prompt provided by a book of prompts (referenced at the end of this story).***
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Prompt: A woman wakes in the early morning to see her shadow sneaking out the bedroom door. She follows. Continue the Story: The woman sees her shadow holding hands with another unattached shadow. What happens next?
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It started as dreams. Visions of faceless people with no names, distant echoes of lost words that would never reveal themselves to me. But there is one thing that has always been the same. In a sudden flash, a shadow appears, standing still and silent before me. And that’s when everything in my vision disappears and my dream world goes dark. I wake to the light of the early morning with the weight of the shadow’s presence on me, and some unexplainable desire to make this dream visitor reveal itself to me.
Each time I experience this dream, I get one step closer to easing that longing I continue to feel, though it remains just out of reach. I’ll hear a whisper, see a blurry feature of the figure that I can’t quite place. But one day, I finally realized that it was a reflection of someone I knew all too well, someone I knew all along. After a flicker of recognition, I felt the rush of innocence from a life long past, and my old feelings of longing were replaced with an overwhelming emptiness as I let the memories in.
There was a time that I must have known her, but all I could seem to remember at that moment was the love of long lost things she felt within her heart, the hopeful retrospection that exuded from her presence. From the emptiness I felt came an overpowering wave of reminiscence and fear, a feeling that made me hold my hands up in my dreamlike state in despair, as if to keep the figure and all that she represented at bay. Suddenly the idea of nostalgia was dangerous to me, and I tried to make myself ignore the pull towards her that would inevitably lead me to believe that things should have never changed, that the memories I clung to in the recesses of my mind weren’t the remnants of a storied past, but the love and beauty of a life that I still clung so tightly to in my present.
As I wrestled with these feelings, the shadow vanished in an instant, like a faint whisper that echoed beyond the dark void before me. And that’s where I woke up on that final winter morning, just as the dawn was breaking through my bedroom window. I must have been half asleep, for when I opened my eyes, I saw her standing there in the dim light in the doorway. As my eyes began to focus, the shadow slowly floated from the room and down the dark hall. I silently rose and stumbled after her. I pursued my mystery visitor through the black corridor filled with memories from my past, and as I followed her, I felt an indescribable ease of mind, as if the figment of my dreams might just be the key to setting me free.
When I rounded the corner at the end of the hall, I saw her there, waiting for me. And for once her face was clear. As she stood there, holding the hand of another shadow, I finally saw a reflection of myself, a ghost of someone who once believed in happiness, in living. I knew even though I couldn’t see the face of her shadow companion that it was another, more distant echo of who I was, one that knew nothing of lost love or false hope. I studied the shadow as it slowly approached me. It paused for a long moment as it silently studied me back. Then it lifted its phantom hand and gently touched my cheek, where a tear had unknowingly fallen from my eyes. And that’s when I saw a lifetime of happiness and sorrow flit by in my mind’s eye in mere seconds, every version of me that had long passed, everything that I was now, and everything that I might hope to be beyond the darkness of this place I had been a prisoner of ever since I gave up on my own life.
Within the same instant of overwhelming joy and pain, everything faded into black, and the figure vanished in the same moment. All that remained was a feeling of clarity about the natural order of things, and the promise of a rebirth of things to come from other bittersweet, wonderfully tragic things. Yes, I knew in that moment, as I stared into the soul of the shadow that remained, that parts of me had died so that I could continue to live.
As the shadow vanished into the morning light, I was left alone, basking and mourning in my long dead and living memories. As I watched my past lose itself to time, that was the first time I smiled in ages. And though that was the last time I had that dream, I knew that it wouldn’t be the last time I saw her. For I knew from then on that my lost souls would always be a part of me, that they are who I am.
THE END
Reference:
Wilson, Tarn. 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts: 501 Prompts to Unleash Creativity and Spark Inspiration. Rockridge Press, 2022.