Bad Dreams

All this pain, divided and alone, we stand apart like so many battered monoliths on a featureless plain under threatening stormy skies.  It reminds my tortured brain of a dream that terrified me as a child and haunts my memories to this day.

I would see three prisoners: a man, a woman, and a child – all one family – and each of them in turn would be locked in their cells with walls of concrete and steel sealing them away from their incarcerated loved ones.

I can only remember the look on the man’s face – the deepest expression of pain I have ever witnessed, as though his world was disintegrating around him.  The look of a man trapped in hell, guilty and alone.

I couldn’t see the guards except for their hands as they went to each cell, looked into the faces of their terrified prisoners, and said to each of them two terrifying words “no light”.

What followed was always the same: the guard would reach through the bars and blindfold the prisoner within, plunging each of their rapidly contracting worlds into darkness.  Confined, blinded, and alone.

For two decades I have feared those images.  Images no young boy should rightfully have dreamt.  Already the nature of the society I was entering was coming clear through dark whisperings and the peculiar feeling that something just wasn’t right.

Nightmares always lingered on the very edges of my vision, as if daring me to build a force, a love, defiant enough to free those people.

My fight had just begun.