Finding Veracity

Finding Veracity

Sitting against a rock with my legs tucked up close to my chest. My fingers turned the pages of a book that was as known to me as the voice of my father. The leather bound book was malleable from years of use, the edges of its pages were smooth to the touch and the leather was beginning to crack along its spine.  
     For me, this book held more then just printed words. This piece of my heart was a mirror of everything I cherished in this life. The rustle of its turning pages held memories I could never forget. The soft leather against the tips of my fingers sparked joy every time they met.
     This was not just a book. This was my soul, my heart, my story. It is everything I was and am. And yet it is so small, barely a hundred-thirty pages slept between its paperback sized leather binding.    
     This book is the manifestation of my steps for the last five years, the echo of my past before that and the soft hum of my birth.
I am the book my fingers cradle. It is me held betwixt aged leather fingers.
We are one and separate. We are the same and different. I am as close to it as it is close to me.
We are never the same and always apart. Who am I? What am I? Am I?

 

Cold, my feet felt so cold. Maybe it was the water from the tide washing over them, almost up to my ankles. Where am I? It looks like the ocean. A blue haze stretches up past the horizon with little distinction between water and sky. Sand, I feel it between my toes, my bare feet tingle as it shifts beneath them.
Laughter fills the air behind me and I turn to see who it is. My foot hits a smooth wood floor. This seems strange somehow, but why? Before me is a beautifully polished marble counter top. I am in a kitchen, cupboards and shelves surround me.
The laughter draws my attention again. This time I look out a window to see a playground blurred by distance. A person, someone I feel as though I should know, is swinging on the playground set.
My hand feels wet and I look down, I’m holding a knife in my right and my left is steadying a wet tomato on a cutting board. It feels odd that I should be here, as if I had done this before. I begin chopping the tomato into thin slices. After finishing I place the slices on a plate. The plate is fine china. Gold filigree weaves a twisting pattern around its edge. Words are written amid the spiraling designs, but, I cannot make them out. I feel as though they have meaning. But why do I feel this? The china is now a book. Or… was it always a book? What was it before? Before?  
A haze washes over my vision and I feel weak. Is this normal? I can’t… remember. Where should I be, what should I be doing?  
Someone is speaking. I think I should be listening but I can’t seem to focus. I’m bent over a desk of some kind. A school desk? I am writing something on a pad of paper. Words, words I have seen. Or have I? The voice grows still, and then it calls out loudly. I know it is calling me but I simply cannot cease writing. Suddenly I feel a hand grab me by the arm and it yanks me up.
Water? Sand? My feet are cold, so very cold. Something is pushing against me from the side. It’s pulling at my clothes and making it hard to stand. A fuzzy thought passes through my mind. Wind, that is its name, but what is it?
My legs go cold as ice up to my thigh. I began to collapse as my knees give way beneath me. Nothing stops me from falling. Strange, shouldn’t I have hit something? I didn’t know what, or why I knew this, but something in me knew this was wrong.
A black nothingness greets my perpetual descent. Normal, this was normal, right? What was normal? Why did I feel like there should be more then what was. Something, a memory, a thought, or feeling was saying that there was a reality far more vibrant than this. A world teeming with a copious range of colors, far grater than what this black abyss held.
I slowly become aware of time. It stretches, on and on; folding in on itself again and again. Assiduously stacking and building until I lost track of the enumerable creases that seemed to now be encasing me.
I gradually become conscious of the shape of my body. Things I somehow knew to be, told me what a body should be. I remembered that I was a girl. A body should have a head, arms and hands. Mine held a leather bound book. What is a book? A body should also have legs. Legs? A book? I begin to understand, to remember what these were but something inside me said that I did not have them. A memory begins to surface.
I cannot clearly define any one thing of it. But there was motion and sound. I tried to focus my thoughts - I knew these were things that could help me define the memory.
Rain. That was the sound. Rain was falling in the memory. But it did not wet my clothes or body, why? A car. That was the thing creating the motion. The blurred memory began to fill with contrast. Words form in my mind and I begin to understand that I was sitting in a car that was driving though the poring rain.
My world distorts as everything was twisted, mangled irrevocably into a roaring chaos. I scream as I fold into a ball, trying frantically to protect the book I grasped so fiercely to. Fear and pain rake over everything I have painstakingly learned over countless ages. I cannot take it, so I push away the words and thoughts, I force away emotion and the memory that I had once tried so hard to remember. I dove back into the comfort of the black abyss. I relishing in the utter absence of Things.
As time begins to refold I hold one thought captive. One precious thought, a life line, to something beyond my reach. Amid the darkness, among the silence and the absence of all things core, it was a light.
That thought is engraved on the cover of the book my fingers cling to so desperately. This book is the source of my hope, these words the reality of my existence.    
“I am Leena Ko'esh, a daughter of life.”