DREAM
I was back in prison.
How did I get there?
I didn’t know.
I should have been, I suspected, on bail but somehow I’d been transported into prison.
A terrible question throbbed, burnt in my brain.
How did I get there?…..
Space….
It was not a normal gaol.
Men and women of varying shapes and sizes were lying or seated in what I imagined a refugee camp to be rather than imprisonment.
Many seemed confused, dazed, and groaning with a suffering I could not understand.
Someone suddenly appeared.
He was delivering mail and it brought an eagerness that invaded every inmates dead eyes.
He gave me a parcel.
It was from a friend with whom I had shared many a dangerous moment.
He had sent me a 9-ounce bar of marijuana.
I quickly, furtively, scrapped the contents into a bag, grateful for his understanding of my situation.
I put the parcel in an old chest of drawers that I recognized as one belonging to my ex wife.
This observation, surprisingly, did not bother me.
I was grateful for the marijuana, thinking it would be able to buy me enough food to stay alive.
But how did he know where I was and why this sense of incarceration?
I determined to approach the authorities as to my status.
I had no recollection of an arrest, though my conscience was unclear, and anyway where were the warders?
Suddenly I was conscious of a dwarf talking constantly in my ear.
He was telling me the score, I sensed he knew of the marijuana, but he gave me the confidence to wander, to wander.
I explored the territory.
Here was a close friend weeping.
He had given up hope.
He was no one specifically and yet everyone I knew.
He had been there for 7 years he told me.
I walked on.
A woman I knew called me, offering advice.
It made me angry and I turned away.
She seemed to plead and it made me think of a small study group.
The woman was not the one individual whom I expected her to be, but all the women I had known, as one.
Yes!
It gave me an irrational hope that though imprisoned I was near the town where this small group met once a year.
The recollection of this meeting seemed associated somehow with my present condition.
I had to get out but how did one escape from a prison with no walls?
Then I realized.
I had to seek; he who had led me there, and this person did not lie, in the light, but the shadow.
He was hidden from the sun by my own body
I contained and hid this presence, behind a mask.
It held me here in this hell.
I looked round at the sad pitiful pleading eyes.
They were strewn, despairingly, across the floor.
At least I was standing.
Indeed I realized I was the only one in that world who could stand on two feet,
who had enough will to wish too…
It was then I began my search.
