A memory.
I wake up and the dragon is already there.
There are stab wounds in my chest; shards of fractured glass drifting in the circuits of my heart and invading its walls.
Today there is a scratch marking my belly. It is deep in some places, and an admixture of acid and a heat that is hot but never warm.
I don’t know if I woke the dragon up, but I have known – many times before – the whirlwinds of its turning wheels and the bright flash behind the smoke. In the past I had cast my blame onto the fickle weather and the pollution of the faceless masses with factories hidden behind horizons.
I don’t know where it lies through the bridging seasons of its sporadic winters, but I’ve learned to sense the sounds of its hibernation, when the fields echo a reckless hope of eternal spring.
I don’t know if it occupies the lair I have built for it on the far side of the moon, nor whether it bore, or is born of, or flees the Parmenidian perfection of that silver circle.
It seems to thrash and cast its caustic breath in tune with a tempo that lies mostly beyond my ear’s ken. I flinch when I hear the expectations of the high notes that harmonize with fear’s secret memories. And sometimes, during the bouts of blind damage and uncaring (as though coincidental) rejection, I see the logic of an eye that flickers open and the shadows of a Babbage engine that had learnt to play a long game of chess. These thoughts inspire me with a paranoia at the magnificence of the its vision and diligence at operating the facades (so often mistaken for reality!) of a puppet-master’s racket.
The tendrils of its breath penetrate deep caverns of obsession with its knocking and invasion that stems like the blood from an unassuming cut between the pounding of old masonry and secret vents (as built by fearful barons).
I have sat in occupied distraction only to be shunted into an alternative present by vibrations that have already heralded too many sufferings not to be read as the Morse code of terrible prognostications. In an instant I may cower in my depths, or arch my neck to behold the sky beyond the window (now barred), searching without understanding for the adumbrating dark smudge.
When it comes in full sight – a dreadful, poisonous darkness that casts its horror as aspirations, yet forever hiding its final breadth or shape behind Stygian pools and paradoxical topologies of cloudy shrouds and maps – then I can study the patterns of its motions and the reflections of its scales that both beckon and refuse the gaze’s (intentions of) attention.
Have I been feeding it? Am I feeding it now? Is it too late to battle a beast that comes to me as a competitive diner? I have written pamphlets that list my observations, offering uncertain hypotheses, before trailing into winding roads of suppositions and premises that lose themselves in reflection and addition.
“Too long” – this is the beginning of a notice I have nailed to door – has the pain come from hidden corners and the cause been unknown. “Too long” – so it continues into tributaries and rivulets of self-pity and compassion, and a great longing that calls for all perfection.
The dragon fled into a place of burning and drowning. I could not follow, and I expect it to return. But it shall know that I have watched it flee, and I shall know this too.
