Floating

    

Preface: Really short story I wrote based on a dream I had.

    You float down from the sky to meet with me, passing through clouds and buildings, riding the winds to where I stand: a bridge overlooking a bay. It is a picturesque view, the seagulls’ squawks cutting through crashing waves, mist spraying with every bombardment of the rocks on the shore. You turn to me. 

I had no idea, you say.

Really? I respond. But it was always there, was it not?

Your eyes are wet from tears or perhaps it is simply the wind as we stare together at this golden orb on the horizon. It draws streaks across the surface of the water, sinking beneath it ever so slightly, its movement hardly perceptible as it paints the hills in the far distance with its lines of orange and yellow and black. How fickle the mind truly is, missing the details which matter in favor of the larger picture, casting aside what allows a person to understand. I can see by the way that you stare that you are falling back into my memories, stepping over the emerald-green of my iris and sinking within the dark recesses of my pupils. They must be shining with the way you stare. 

Come, I’ll show you the way.

I was younger then, much younger. The images are like fleeting glimpses from a dream, an illusion that loses focus the more I stare at it. My shirtsleeve, my arm extended towards my mother as we ascended into the fractal mall. Islands of tile, rows and rows of them, reaching up into the endless abyss of the space, a ceiling I never saw nor got even close to in my many years of visiting. A neverending pattern, a three-dimensional grid of fractured storefronts, employees stranded within the square-meter area allotted to them as customers came and went, flowing in and out of what classified as the doors of each store in the place. Things worked differently there.You float along with my twelve-year-old self in my mind's eye, seeing all the things I saw, living through the husk of my memory, drifting lazily with my mother past each store we knew we didn’t have the money to shop at, each place we knew we’d stop in just to pretend like we could buy something, all as we stepped over each of the perfectly cut ravine-like abyss.  The dress on display–

I am alone. I stand in my room wearing it.

You look at me. We’re on the bay again. I lost my concentration.

Again.

My mother holds my hand and we float along, between fractured kiosks; watch repair, screen protectors, a big stand holding a car–not a split one but instead whole–sitting on lines of marble. I see people above us, around us, in all directions meandering about in the air, going off on their own little journeys like my own, but everyone’s path is different. Some hang around by the plants on islands whose fountains create waterfalls that flow down past the entrance and into the foggy abyss below it, the wildlife crawling around to turn the tile back into its natural form. A few look lost, hungry, afraid, unsure of where to turn, but that is alright, for they will know one day, and everything will make sense to them again. From somewhere music sounds off, messages from the unseen operators. We enter the department store to their curated shopping soundtrack, the dress still on display at the forefront of the clothing section.

Sinking, further, further. The memory ends but the feelings do not, the fixations.