“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”
“You will lose all sense of words, one by one, each by each,” the angel whispered and as I listened I felt a tearing and wrenching. One word struggled out of my consciousness. It heaved itself from the bloody brain tissue and bored into bone and hair leaving a microscopic pinhole of air where it had lodged itself years ago. I felt the loss and worried about the hole left behind.
“Will you come each time I lose a word,” I asked the angel with a quivering inner voice I had never heard before in dreams or visions.
The being shimmered, waved like a fish beneath a flowing stream changing shape and dimension until it broke the surface of the flow and answered, “No. You will not know when these words escape until you try to catch one and then you’ll be left with a pinhole of blank space filled with a tiny pencil point of light from the outside. Over time you will carry a halo of tiny light spears wherever you go because the outside light will fill the blanks and give you a crown of thorns, thorns that puncture more than your brow. You will be a beautiful blank, unable to reflect the outside world. You will become a magnet for celestial essences of which there are many and more.”
I gazed inward, horrified, bereft, yearning to capture the angel in a bell jar, a snow globe, an enclosure transparent and shining. As I gazed, speechless, the angel moved further to the back of my mind. It was a black and white mindscape filled with pinwheels of soft light and as I tried to discern the flowing clothing surrounding my messenger, I thought I saw white wings or blowing clouds, robes maybe. I could almost feel what they were. Bandages!
“Who or what has wounded you, angel?” I asked. Within seconds I knew of one of the many culprits. Without any speaking, the word “attachment” presented itself like a block of carved, black granite, almost impossible to see but as my mind felt the smooth surface, letters and meaning became clear.
“When or if this word escapes from me, the hole it leaves behind will be huge,” I thought.
“It is not about you,” whispered the angel and its words reeled me in from the cluttered tunnel my awareness had wandered into. It was a channel of static, a snapping place, seldom quiet and never dark. It was a comfortable place where I spun and bounced and felt but never stopped to know. I did not want to go where the angel dwelled, not now.
I felt the messenger fading as it grew larger in my black and white dream space. As I breathed in, the angel’s gorgeous face expanded and as I breathed out, the angel and its bandages grew faint, small and grey. I held my breath.
“Will I be with you again,” I asked.
The angel expanded and contracted with each breath until a silver shower of tiny bits of light formed into a faint sunbeam, particles rising toward the outside darkness. Pinwheels, meteor showers of white against blackness filled the vision. Over time, blackness remained relieved only by the granite shine of that one terrifying word.
“What was that word I dreamed?”
