The World in My Head

I stand in molten silver and gold

        staring into a reflection that stares back warped.

By my side, Xavier rocks on his heels.

His hand’s resting on his sword pummel

        at his side

        with its wondrous rainbow eye

        as he asks why I’m scared. Why I doubt. Why I don’t want to move.

The rainbow eye I saw in a dream that maybe was not a dream.

A blond woman with a bob cut and a blue blouse

        told me that Christ was wanting to speak with me

        atop an empty concrete warehouse.

We rode the elevator, and she was simply smiling.

I was shell-shocked that Christ chose me.

The elevator paused at the last level;

usually, Christ walked the gardens on the roof

        but today, He was in the dark. A piercing white light shining like a

                grain of rice against black paper

                or a star in the night sea.

I couldn’t make out His face within the light. Only His flowing white robes

        and hair

        and hands, outstretched before Him with a rainbow disk floating between the palms.

                The iris pulsed, flowing from the milky core through the wiry colors raised up

                        the way the muscle of an iris is.

I knew, upon seeing it with my eyes, that it was the eye of God.

Christ told me two words in a heavenly language,

        and the dream ended.

“God wills it.”

Xavier draws his sword. He rests the blade in his palm, clutches the hilt in his hand,

        and admires the pummel.

He asks what’s wrong with it.

I say that the dream doesn’t make sense.

Why would Christ be in a dark, miserable, empty, concrete warehouse?

Why would the angel be a blond woman in bright blue?

He expresses that it’s probably symbolic, but he knows as much as I do

        so is probably just playing along.

        I let him, if only to get it off my chest.

I had another dream, maybe a year after the first.

I rode a boat with fourteen or so tween boys and a Middle Eastern man

        in soft blue robes

        who was very quiet among us.

I saw him as Christ, but no one recognized him but me.

But I was disarmed, because I saw his face

        when I shouldn’t have been able to.

We landed at an island, and the man led us up to the double doors

        of a concrete warehouse

        and vanished, as if to say,

                You’re ready.

The doors led to a narrow chamber, and more doors,

        these ones without handles

but as I led the boys,

        the doors opened at my approach.

Several chambers we passed through,

        one containing a small chapel lit by candle glow

        and an older woman in blue satin sitting in a pew

                        alone.

        Her head was down. I couldn’t see her face.

        We walked past knowing to speak with her

        was a waste of time

        because she was evil in disguise.

Xavier tests the sword’s balance in his hands with a light toss.

        He casts me a funny smile as he asks who the woman looks like.

        I confess, a politician

                with views contrary to the Bible despite her religious affiliation.

        He asks when I had this dream.

        I confess the year, 2017.

        She most likely was often still in the news.

We reached the end of the doors

        and entered a labyrinth 

        of yellowing, peeling wallpaper and cluttered antiques.

We became separated, some alone, some with another,

        but our confident intent—to destroy the evil within the facility—

        no longer was so confident

                when it began to seek us

                and hunt us down

        separated and alone.

I hid in a bellhop shaft with a boy,

        he could have been one of my cousins,

                for all I know,

        and was so scared.

We reunited at an open room—

        maybe a ballroom, or an expansive entranceway,

—where the evil force stood before us

        wearing the skin of an antagonist from a video game

                who was a demon in disguise,

                tempting people from God with forbidden knowledge.

We had nothing to defeat it with.

And within moments, it burned like paper

        as a light erupted from behind it,

        as if an angel or Christ himself intervened.

It spoke of being happy to suffer

        before it disappeared

        and we knew it would return again someday

        but in the moment, we had won.

With a raise of his eyebrows, Xavier offers

        that the two buildings don’t sound the same.

That the one was empty and dark,

        much like a parking garage,

and the other was cluttered and lit,

        like a haunted home made livable.

I never did see the outside of the first concrete building.

Maybe it was not the same,

        yet it still made little sense, Christ being in a place

        such as that.

Xavier is about to sheath the sword

        before hesitating to glance at the eye of God

        and offering,

                that maybe it’s symbolic for Christ being here,

                in our faith-barren world,

                and maybe the woman in blue was not an angel

                but someone I know, may come to know, or never had a chance to know,

                or simply a messenger,

                or perhaps an older me.

                After all, the other woman in blue was not the same.

                She was the evil one in the skin

                        of the woman who told me that Christ wanted me

                        to come to him.

He confesses that he can’t understand

        or maybe we can’t ever understand

        if the man in the second dream was Christ

        or someone misleading me, and I believed him.

Maybe it doesn’t matter.

The meaning remains the same:

        Beware false prophets, and false believers

        Beware fragmenting when the Church cannot stand apart

        Beware putting confidence in the self,

                especially in matters related to the spirit.

Yet even through our failings,

        God is still there

        providing His protection.

He offers me his sword.

I take it, feeling a little numb.

He pulls, tries to pull, my attention from the silver and gold around our boots

        and to the white around me. The emptiness.

        I don’t reciprocate his request.

Xavier laughs, as if someone told the funniest joke ever heard in all his life.

He forces me around by my shoulder,

        and says that I’ve been seeking my story

        within the reflective corpse of my prison.

There isn’t white, like I think,

        there’s a planet. There’s life.

        All of it captured and bent within the mirror labyrinth’s ruins.

Again,

        he asks why I’m scared. Why I doubt. Why I don’t want to move.

I say that I don’t want to lose

        the world I made.

        the characters I created.

        the stories, good and bad.

Xavier insists he’s not seeking his own death—

        in fact, life would be so much better out there anyway,

        and he’s been aching to leave for what feels like forever now.

He gestures to the reflection,

        the mimic,

        the imitation,

        of my world,

        and reminds me that if I’m not happy there,

        why should I grieve what’s lost?

I go to hand back the sword; he pushes the hilt deeper into my palms.

I express that I’m afraid that my dreams were nothing.

        Only dreams.

        Or, worse, a testing I failed.

        False teachings I believed.

There was one more dream,

        The same night I had the second one.

I was sitting outside on a

        rather unrealistic version of my alma mater’s campus. 

        I was drawing.

Three lions approached—

        two female, one striped,

        and one male,

—and in that moment,

I was sure I was to die.

One of the females called me a small fry

        —a waste of her time—

before the three leapt impossibly into a window

        high up in an apartment building 

        right on campus.

Xavier beams. He tightens his grip on my fingers,

        and thereby my fingers on the hilt.

He says that

        God has plans for me.

        God will protect me.

        God will lead in matters of the heart

                and of discernment.

        God has warned me to not credit my talents

                or misplace my confidence in myself.

        God has promised that even if I get lost,

                He will be there.

        God has shown me the value in my art,

                and the target audience of my writing.

He asks me about the image God put in my head

        of the bookstore shelf

        in the fantasy section.

I cower a bit from his face and his expectations.

        I don’t know how to write another novel

        I’m scared to try again facing another failure

        I’ve played with so many approaches but quit them all

        I’d considered avoiding it in favor of another medium

        I can’t proceed without knowing what to do

                so I don’t quit again.

Xavier points out that I’m gripping the sword too tightly now.

I’m not giving God room to speak.

I’m not looking anywhere but at my own failings.

        I need to let this story go to be its own thing,

                for God,

                but I’m scared of making the wrong decision and failing again.

Besides, my writing is

        like my depression.

I make my characters miserable to feel better about my own misery

        but it only makes me more miserable.

I write my characters are believers because so am I,

        but their world is bleak and abandoned by God.

I give my characters visions and symbolic dreams

        but give them punishment and confusion from them.

Xavier points out that it’s because I’m still viewing them

        through the distorted lens of the mirror.

        Of myself.

        Of the Core, melted.

        Of the reasons the Mirror Labyrinth was built.

How do I be free? I ask.

He pulls me, again, from the molten silver

        and gestures out at the planet around me.

He reminds me that the lives of everyone living on it

        is more than their suffering and heartache.

That they have joys and weird idioms and inside jokes.

They have brotherhood and sisterhood and families.

They have human legacies.

If they must suffer, give them a joy.

If they must despair, give them a light.

If they must die, give them a life.

I ask if I can keep my website, my imprint. Reflections.

He looks baffled. Why not? he says.

        The melted silver and gold will always scar its surface.

        But it is now free.

Xavier gestures for me to follow him

        across this new planet’s surface

        to find the stories that need to be written

        and the characters that need to be drawn.

He says that healing needs bravery.

I take a breath—and a final look—before putting my back to the reflections

        and taking his hand. 

I’m scared, I confess. What if I look back?

I expect irritation or worry, concern, doubt.

But he only twists a grin

        of wistfulness and wry mirth.

If you do, he says, make the scar part of the story.

A story which is no longer warped

        in my own mirrors.