The Mirror and the Mask

It won't keep me logged in for long enough to even view a page most of the time nowadays - which is awful, since UrsulaV finally decided her journal has enough prospective grubby-fingered goblin visitors that she put it behind a 14+ wall.

I'm here because I need to record something for myself.

Last week - sometime - the week before? I won't know, as it's tax season and frantically busy. But recently, I was in enough of a state to withdraw into my head in a way that I hadn't since I was making masks once a week. (2007, if you weren't there.)

I was curled into a chair and aching enough to have gone mentally numb in that tenuous way - push too hard and you'll break the surface tension and fall through, and you will drown in the dark while your lungs and throat erupt in fire and your eyes and hands and feet and tongue turn to stones dragging heavily at your flesh. Do not disrupt. But if you tilt your head just right, and you lay very still, and do not breathe too much, what floats to the surface like bubble iridescence can stun. If you turn it this way - and dreams are what it showed me, after all.

There is a girl with skin the color of straw and great dark eyes and lips like willow leaves laying on the ground below. Her hair is a thick tangle of roots off her scalp and the same shade as her skin and they settle but not-quite-sink across the earth in a fan around her head.

And then I know more about her, her breaking heart and why she only just breathes, and her beautiful lover with no face, luminous and faintly golden, who takes up nearly all her sight in her mind, and flashes of comely river-girls with hair like seaweed tumbling down their shoulders, brief snatches of darting sky-women all thin down snowflaked over sharp talons, and how lovely and how different and how much she feels for everything, how she churns at the center while she holds herself still, pressed into the soil, pulling air and water in once for every time it falls back out again.

And then I am me, again, and realizing what I am being told, and what is happening, and supposed to be having a conversation, and I wonder why that world left me so long ago, and moreso, why it came back.

The news about the Scientology protest reached me shortly before it happened - but the choice to wear masks, and the choice OF masks... If I were feeling more coherent, I'd essay on it a while, and the dramatic irony inherent in such a thing... and I'm sure I will eventually. In any case, it made me smile to see them used for one of their many and so desperately necessary purposes, for the first time in quite some while.

But right now, I'm exhausted, and so a certain something drifted in and out of my mind and was very nearly lost back into the murky depths tonight as I fade here and back half-conscious.

"But it's such a shallow thing. It's beauty without substance."

She blinked huge amber-brown eyes and cocked her head like a mantis at him. "Shouldn't that be the best kind? Ephemeral, illusory...." Her hands began to weave like grass as her gaze drifted off to one side, softening, as if she was too deep in thought to be conscious of their itching desire to make. Then she stopped, all at once, and peered back into his face, slightly creasing her brow. "Sometimes I don't understand you at all."

"What?"

"Mortals. You. And why do things need to be real, anyway?"