The reflection of the Queen: Exile

Chapter 20

THE DREAM MAN

The world I lived in was continually disappearing and reappearing, and I with it. It all depended on when my Persie fell asleep.

As dreams go, they never took a definite form. At first I remember finding it disorienting, but after seventeen years of intermittent existence I had been forced to appreciate its strange beauty. After all, that unreal place was the fruit of Persie's imagination, and sometimes of my own. Strands of thoughts unknown even to ourselves intertwined incomprehensibly in unique ways, each night I would open my eyes to find myself in a different ephemeral scenario. When everything melted into fog, I would confine myself to a corner of his mind, waiting for another dream that would allow me a way out.

Together with the girl I have cared for, I swam in oceans of shadows, rolled through meadows of mist, jumped in endless falls, walked through the starry sky, talked to faceless characters, contemplated hypnotic storms, flew aimlessly, visited the bleakest wastelands, ran without moving and faced dozens of fears that were not mine. Without being aware that, for her, none of it made sense. That world, that life, was all I had ever known.

Or so I thought.

I lived for a long time believing I was nothing more than a figment of the imagination of a little girl who needed someone to take care of her. As much as I loved her, and I did with all my heart, she was all I had. I accepted my emptiness because I thought it was part of me. Since Persie's magic awakened, since I discovered that she was something more, I have realized that she is not. I was never something imaginary or non-existent, at least not once, and that has made me feel my loneliness, the feeling of all those things I lack, as something real. Knowing that I possess memories of an existence that has been veiled from me all this time makes me despair while relieving me, it fills me with impotence and determination. My new goal was to recover everything that made me part of reality, I wanted to belong to it as much as possible. There was only one thing I could do: to force out all the memories imprisoned in the depths of my soul, to bring out my identity, my reality, because after knowing all this I would no longer think of myself as an imperceptible presence, I would no longer consider myself imaginary. Maybe, that way, I could be there for my little girl. Even as I was beginning to know myself, she was all that mattered to me.

I looked at her, sitting next to me. We were both sitting on an image that was running through both of our heads: some rocks forming a riverbed. The water, reflecting multicolored light on its gentle current, did not make us feel cold at all. As the days passed, I had come to the conclusion that the metaphor I had used the last time we spoke was wrong. My memory was not a riverbed, but a quarry. A quarry from which, for the time being, I had only extracted pebbles.

Persie was being very brave, but I could feel her tired. Her soul was metamorphosing before my eyes, elements were emerging that I already thought had disappeared. Her eyes, two dead stars as hard as diamonds, were fixed on the bright, infinite horizon. The ripples of the water rose up her white nightgown as if she were part of the current.

I remember when I was very little, before all those traumas and nightmares came along, there were a couple of times she called me "daddy". At that time her dreams didn't give me enough details of her life to let me know that she was terribly lonely and had no one else, but I liked that she called me that a couple of times. I considered myself little more than a figment of her mind, and yet I was moved as never before and vowed to myself that I would protect that little girl as much as I could.

Later, I realized that I could not protect her at all.

Nightmares came, full of darkness, pain, fear, all because of this man who, in the real world, pretended to be her father. It was then that I realized that Persie was really alone, because I couldn't help her. I was useless. She couldn't avoid all the horrible things that awaited her outside of her dreams. As his gaze faded day by day, I never heard him call me that way again.