Do you remember the night
I translated a dream for you?

You agreed and later that night
we began to put your pain into perspective

You're sending me letters
signed, sealed and delivered
from your new home

I'm saving all your letters
where only longing lingers
we've not known each other long
but waves of your scent
are already mapped on my mind

In your stories you write of
an explosion in your chest
bats burst from hibernation
forcing your ribs to break
your skin ripping apart

You tell me of a whistling in your chest
a candles been blown out
smoke rising from a darkened hollow cave

The emptiness feeds off flesh
you're scratching at your skin
the remains tipping into your chest

It's filling-
filling every day

And that is when you wake
choking, gasping for air

Your letters end as abruptly
as your night terrors
bad dreams leaving you breathless
waking up drenched in sweat

Your last lines of this weeks letter read;
When I lift my tired body
from the bed
the bedroom light illuminates
my skin
I see I'm real
I see I've not clawed my flesh
no track marks from my fears

We're sat together with
the letters all telling
the same story, again and again
you voicing your dreams,
dreams spawning nightmares

Do you remember I was going to
translate these dreams for you?

How the bats are actually butterflies
how butterflies are subjected to
a caged darkness before the light
How the whistling in your chest
is fertile ground for growth
How the suffocating filling
is the abundance of love
this world can give us
if,
if we only subject a change
to our perceptions

Love and fear cannot exist
together within us
with fear is suffering
with love is healing.

Do you remember the night
I translated a dream for you?

The night we set fire to the letters
imagining the crimping paper
as the disintegration of
each and every
fear.


© Sia Jane