Awakening

His sleep is restless. Faces stare at him through the mists of memory. These faces first appear as
tiny specks in an infinite expanse of the sky. Then they stalk him, and circle him. Finally, they
descend and wait just beyond the reach of limbs. Wait until the limbs move no more.

Faces of lost loves. Where are they now? Are they happy? Do they remember him? People who
were dear to him, and held him dear. They are no more than ghosts now. These fading images
were once as real as he is. But they are no more. Dissolved from the inside out. More faces stare
at him through the haze. There are some nameless faces, faces that he ran into on street-corners,
in shops, in parties. They were nameless then, and are nameless still. And then there are some
faces that he hated. Faces that made him shudder in disgust, and wish they were dead. Did they
die in pain? He groans and turns in his bed. Death: one experience he probably will not remember.
Always someone else's face there.

Faces wear garbs of other memories. Summer days. The kind of days that come every year, and
yet somehow are never the same. Days when heat awakened a primal urge. Winter days. When
cold found a way through all those walls. Perhaps his bones still remember the chill. Sunrises
-alas, too few but remembered well. Sunsets, too many to remember. Ticks of an invisible clock:
sunrise, sunset, summer, winter. Are these memories related to each other? Links of the same
chain?

In the dead of the night he can see his footprints now. Footprints in shifting sand -right and left,
right and left. It looks like a journey. Maybe it even is. He does not remember setting out on one,
he just realized one day that it looks like one. Destination unknown. Where would he be if he had
taken another road? Would the same faces gaze across the veils of mist?

His insides are empty. As far as he can remember, they have always been, even when he did not
know it. A void lives inside of him, a devoted companion. Yet he does not even know the name of
the void. It grows in him, like a baby growing in a mother's womb. But he's afraid of the void. He
fears when the gestation is over, the baby would swallow the parent. He tries to fill it. It does not
take a God to fill that void. Perhaps His miracle is that He is resurrected everytime He is devoured.
The serpentine words of wisdom are useless too -they stare back at him silently before
disappearing. The void always wants more. He can never stop to rest, he must feed the void. The
void eats everything, his footprints, other's footprints -he runs like a madman searching for food.
He runs up and down different paths. Sometimes he finds something hefty, and it takes a little bit
longer for the void to swallow it. But inevitably he is on the run again...

He imagines what would happen if he cannot fill the void. The final moments as he waits. Will fear
give way to resignation, or embrace? And then the painful moment when he is turned inside out. A
searing pain before the calm. The last dance of a water drop before it is vaporized. Devoured from
the inside out.

He is awake now. The room is dark, like the inside of a womb. He feels the thinning skin of his
body. It is time to feed again.