Slow MoverA Stranger in the House
In my dreams, I shout.
The words fall from my mouth and wake me in the moment of the last word.
In times of terror, when I sleep, my tongue becomes thick. The words have difficulty forming. They struggle to be released, as if they must pass through mud, or blood, or memory. Then I awake with the last words still on my lips, wondering who I was around the table with the others, and why I was so distressed.
In the morning, my lover tells me she heard my voice shouting.
She says it did not sound like me.
I was another man.
A stranger in the house.
And I am left waking from a dream I can barely remember, wondering at its origin, curious as to why it came, even though I know its meaning may elude me like all troubling dreams: present in the body, lost in the waking.
So often it has been anger that has driven my voice.
Anger against perceived injustice.
Anger sharpened by fear.
Anger standing in for courage.
Anger disguising grief.
Anger becoming the only language loud enough to make me feel as if I am doing something, saying something, resisting something. And perhaps, at times, anger has been a necessary alarm. Perhaps it has awakened me when numbness would have been easier. Perhaps it has named what politeness wanted buried.
But anger is a hard voice to live inside.
It burns the throat that carries it.
It can become another form of captivity, another stranger in the house, pacing the rooms, turning over tables, shouting at shadows long after the danger has passed.
And so I wonder whether the dream is not only about terror.
Maybe it is about voice.
Maybe somewhere beneath the shouting, there is another sound trying to be born.
Not the voice that must win.
Not the voice that must accuse.
Not the voice that must prove itself righteous by the force of its volume.
But a different voice.
A voice formed not by fear but by love.
A voice that can still name injustice without becoming consumed by it.
A voice that can grieve without needing to destroy.
A voice that can speak truth without losing tenderness.
A voice that can say, “This is wrong,” and still remain human.
Maybe the stranger in the house is not only the angry man I fear becoming.
Maybe he is also the hidden self who has never learned another way to speak.
Maybe he shouts because he does not yet know how to weep.
Maybe he rages because he has not yet trusted that sorrow can also be strong.
Maybe he wakes me because he wants to be changed, not silenced.
There is a stranger in me who has not yet been welcomed.
There is a voice in me that only finds release when I am no longer guarding the door.
And when I wake with the last word on my lips, frightened by the sound of myself, perhaps I am not merely waking from the dream.
Perhaps I am waking into it.
Perhaps I am being invited to discover a different voice:
not less truthful,
not less passionate,
not less awake to suffering,
but less afraid.
A voice no longer thickened by terror.
A voice no longer driven only by anger.
A voice that rises from somewhere deeper than outrage.
A voice that has passed through the fire and learned, at last, to bless.
The Pagan Grove
C. L. Nichols
Emberhart
Sanjay Mohindroo
Sanjay Mohindroo
Aggrogamer
Dionous Games