The Dream Keepers Daughter

She was always seperate...

set apart from the rest by her timeless eyes and the breath of mystery she housed within her soul. They could never put a name to her or brand the  thing about her that frightened them the most. Her thoughts were beyond anything they could follow and even her language bore evidence of an ancient tongue from a lost time. As a small child she would entertain long conversations with  halo's of sunlight and dance for hours to the ethereal music of undulating water droplets that fell from the rain bells. She was odd... and it made them all uneasy at best. She was 5 years old when she first  realized that she could see and hear what others could not and with it  the dawning conclusion  that being different was not necessarily the sum of a good thing. so she began to supress this strangness...this element once treasured and coveted was now  put to rest...sleeping beneath  layers of denial she fastened together with collected pieces of fear and shame. Her blessing had become her curse. The day she snapped in two was a day like any other. The ground  did not shake and the sky did not fall and there were no dramatic markers to anounce the birth of her seperating self. It was born of her nakedness inside a tepid bath and in the slightest bending of occupied space she became very aware of the fact that she could not recognize herself. Her hands seemed not her own and her faltering voice came from that of a stranger. The experience was so unnerving that she began to concentrate hard on nothing and everything ... on anything at all to distract her from this accute awareness of self  and the frightning prospect of being tethered to a body she did not know or recognize. As the years went by She became quite skilled in the art of distractions. she made clever masks with chemical coushioning and immense hiding places burrowng deep into distant realities to hide from that which frightened her the most...herself.  It was not until the dawning of her dreams that her constructed realities began to break and hint at the sleeping gift now yawning and stretching within her struggling to break free. It was in the  space between waking and sleep that she would feel herself moving very fast...enveloped by the strange buzzing and compression in her ears she would feel herself begin to move up and out. Her sleeping self knew what was to come next but her waking self would claim her and hurl her back into her body with the force of one being slammed into concrete. She would collide with her dream self often and it was never pleasant and she was always afraid. The stress of it spilling over into every area of her waking life made all the more difficult because there wasnt anyone to tell and when she tried she was always met with raised eyebrows and well intentioned but completely misguided advice. There was more too She often felt as though she might be having someone elses dreams but again who could she confide this too....there wasnt anybody and the lonliness was agonizing. It seemed she was a question that could not be answered. She began to clutter her days with her collection of distractions leaving them scattered  throughout the hollow rooms of her heart. Anything to  up fill up the empty in her spaces and for a time it worked.She was living in the "in between" in the space between dancing and flailing and in the flailing would come collapse But it was that which she had crumbled against that provided her most with the answers she sought. It was the old man with kindness in his eyes who would come to her in the night...who whispered dreams into her ear...like soft echo's of falling snow settling in drifts against her challace of memories...imprints too faded for waking hours... reserved only for sleeps deciphering tongue.

 And in the clearest moment of singularity her scattered pieces aligned...

She was the dream keepers daughter...

as she had always been from the beginning of time.