Falling Away

She thought about the falling away process. She recognized it came in clusters. Several people close to her, all dying within a short time, several friends leaving her sphere at the same time, whether they were acquainted with each other or not. It left a strange veil of cold over her to think about it.

Things are presaged by dreams in her life. Some so distorted, she only recognizes them by a remote similarity of color or design in a waking incident, and often put this down as déjà vu, until memory forces itself upon the conscious mind.

The other dreams though, are starkly real, They play themselves out in the conscious and aware mind with a jolting adherence to fidelity. Those dreams give her a sense of having lived too long in the present time warp, and a desire to escape through a small opening, if she could find it. The truth of it all is that searching for the entry/exit of a particular time is futile. Time wraps itself around some, and force-feeds events into their lives no matter how valiant their attempts to escape might be.

She pulls her wrap closer around herself, staving off the chill of knowing too much at times. The affliction is coveted by the uninitiated, who imagine it as a magic carpet ride...this ability to understand.

There were times she tried to tell them what it was like, but it was a waste of breath to explain how it felt to recognize the horror of phantom pain in a limb severed in an accident, or to know the emptiness of the bed of the widow, or the hunger for a gentle touch the leper lives with, even as the flesh loses it's capacity to receive sensations.

Or how it is to feel the fear of the cancer victim, waiting, terrified of death, knowing his kiss will come. Or of how she sees the deadened eyes of the newly hopeless, recognizing the echo of the moment before the heart ceased looking for a solution.

The chill passes over her again. She knows it comes from within. The room is quite warm. She calls it by its name. It does not leave, but dogs her steps as she crosses the room, lifts the dark green watering can, and gives continued life to the hanging plant.

Later, as she leans back in a chair not designed for lounging, she sees a spider making it's way across the ceiling, and wonders, if it fell onto her tongue, what it would taste like.