The Harbinger Within

All I remember is moving through the river’s course, eyes searching the deep blue sky, which was only broken by the occasional branch of a low hanging aspen slipping through my peripheral vision. It had seemed like ages since this river had taken me on its loving journey through the canyons of my dreams, reflecting against the silence of my own heart, the beat becoming the sound and pulse of the dark water which cradled me in its cool comfort.  

I am truly at the center of the soul. The two no longer struggling to become the one, floating along the outer edges as the sun casts warm fingers across an ageless primordial landscape. My eyes close for a moment in pitch black, and then the sound of singing filters though a clouded warm mist. A reflection of my weathered face gazing at me from a broken mirror, a reflection somehow distorted around the lines of light and shadow…. Fading, then back again to the river moving ever to gently across to the other side.

Marilyn’s Soft White Slippers 

Looking behind the mask that is the city of angels, it moves through your veins like a bad drug. The soul caught halfway in diluted hallucinations and the other half in the distortion of living. It often brings up the question’s that drive us to madness and eventually to a death….. But isn't it preordained in a sense?

The bedroom was flooded in darkness and soft moonlight with the latter shooting through divided curtains and casting a white blue glow across her pale blond features.  I lit a smoke and studied her for a moment, lying beside her among the disheveled bedding. Her life interrupted streamed through my mind’s eye like a moving picture in sepia celluloid…. For the first time certain angst caught me in surprise, traveling like a spirit mist through a timeless dark landscape that was Norma Jean. 

She stirred slightly as the last few warm breaths expelled. Her soul no longer in turmoil.

Beautiful child within the dream, fragmented for only a brief moment.

I stood and walked softly to her side of the bed, crushing my cigarette in the glass ashtray next to her bottled prescriptions on the bedside stand, touching her softly with the other hand and coaxing her soul into flight. 

I reached down onto the floor and took her soft white slippers into my hands and brought them to a cold cheek, feeling the last warmth of the living…. But that warmth slowly dissipated as her essence now stood in the black shadows of the room, eyes gently incandescent, knowing.  I extended my hand to her as I dropped the slippers……… We both walked together along the void and into the night, guiding her towards a distant pinpoint of light.

She never looked back.