The Shifting Sands letter

We went down the mountain pass as if in a dream. The cold-heart winter was left behind, yet the ever nagging hollowness was evermore harrowing. Four. A door with the golden number four on it. Vivid. It’s so vivid. As cold and spacious the mountain top was, it gave me reassurance. Is that the right word? Hope. It gave me hope. Four. A door. But to where? Before we started this journey, I never dreamt I would be asking myself that question- entertaining it. Four. A door. To where? But through it all it gave me hope. Everything will be okay, everything is okay.
But we lost ourselves in a dream- on the way down- another mirage in our ever fleeting consciousness. A false perception jutting itself through to our senses, maybe the more we wanted it the more it became true. I don’t want distractions, not anymore. I want what’s real. But it is true what they say; be careful what you wish for. For at the end of the mountain dissention, we came across our mirrors-reflections. Is this who we are? At the bottom of the mountain, the air set our breaths from thin, freezing gasps to heavy, suffocating draws. It was as if with every movement of breathing, fire was being dragged across our throats, we were the scale less dragons of the desert. A vast desert, seemingly unending. Is this who we are?
Our steps went almost impossibly from the crunch and lingering imprint of the last snowfall to the passive sigh of burning sand, imprinted merely momentarily by our steps and as quickly swept up by the unallied breeze leaving our tracks forgotten under the ever shifting landscape. Forgotten. Is this what we have become? A wasteland of fractured realities and deserted philosophies? We are not only the forgotten dragons, moving across an unsympathetic desert, but this sand shows mirages to the clear headed. Just as Eliot’s Wasteland yields laughter to the logical, this place brought absurdist theatre to full bloom, though Beckett wasn’t our conductor.
This is where our past, present and the unknowns have come together. Quite absurdly, though within the natural realms of construction, waves of mirrors broke through the sea of sand and showed us what we had become on the journey. What we had become so far. Now is where we have to face ourselves. As we each approached the real-life apparitions, I started to feel everything in me shifting, just as rapidly as the molding sands. I could truly see myself for the first time. Burnt, and bruised, and broken- a true reflection of the wasteland we were treading. I can feel it all over, like someone dancing on my grave, the unknowns-the now.
I thought that this journey made me stronger; why does doubt continually parade itself around me like a friend of caution-constantly spewing lies, speaking twisted truths, and shouting shame at me? But I can’t speak- can’t tell it to go- I can’t share my piece, and retain any peace. I must shout it out, I must say it aloud. We are not the scale less dragons swallowing fire in the shifting reality of the desert, we are not the ones who will hold up our flags in surrender and become what this desert has told us to be. We must make it through, and give up these mirages that reflect back at us-for what else is a desert good for but to shove baseless lies at the receiver of hope.
Just at that moment, faintly, like a blooming awareness of the need to remember something so important, a faint whisper echoing in our subconscious, the light of our ongoing guidance wisped across the mirrors like someone seeing through their peripheral a light being turned on in the other room. It was enough to make us look away from the apparitions of the desert to a signpost set firmly in the sand not even a length away.
We all slowly, unsurely, moved toward the sign and as the words became clear-and message received-we moved back to the mirrors, only momentarily mind you, and stepped on the false reflections that had captivated our gaze. With the breaking glass the desert became all the more full with its elements as the mirrors melted like snow. The words inscribed on the wooden sign, were the words of each of our own Abanai Jah- the hidden name of our guide, manifested now in words. The words different for me than they were for the others, unable to be brought to ink, or to physical manifestation, yet crafted for our individual eyes as individual souls.
Through the words though, I now know I am not what you say. I am not your lies. I am not you. The mirrors of accusation have been broken by the roar of thunder of my Abanai Jah. Abanai Jah. The rain of my Muse. This desert will never yield thorns again, for the rain has come to cleanse the land. My land. Four. The three of us and our Abanai Jah. The door leading to the light has pierced the night; the fog and ice. Where it will take us I do not know, but soon will. Perhaps. Perhaps we soon will know. Vale.