My cup runneth over: in sleep, in weight, in years – I am Rip Van Winkle, slumbering unnoticed in the branches of the hundred-year tree, and my hair is growing longer with each remembered breath. (In sleep, as in death, our faces slacken in repose: our dreams, while not necessarily a smiling matter, weigh down our limbs until we are as stone, and the dust of the living collects, like rainwater, in our hollows. Settles, until we are again but as remembered things: silent and still; a feast for the living, but no less than fallen comrades to those already gone.)
Let it down, he urges, but oh, what a climb that would be! I have been here for centuries – though surely a millennia would be more accurate – and with each passing day I have grown more and more mute, until it is all I can do to find it in myself to argue against the course he suggests.
But good sir! I cry – ha! Cry, as though I have even a fraction of the energy necessary for such a task – even were these thin strands strong enough to hold your weight, the climb would be an arduous one. Are you quite certain you are ready for such an undertaking?
Snap – a branch cracks and creaks under the weight of all my lies, and I stir, sweating and lost beneath a sea of hair. I am alone, the “good sir” in question nothing more than a figment of a perpetually active imagination. Even in my dreams, it seems, I am incapable of capturing attention.
(More unfortunate in the waking world, perhaps – in dreams, at least, I have a net.)
Just across the strike of twelve lies my world – an appropriate enough facsimile, at any rate; it fooled my father, though that was never particularly difficult to do. He lives there still, just beyond the horizon. I see him, sometimes, when I am asleep – and it is with ever-increasing force of will that I pull myself away from its borders every sunrise.
It would not do to get trapped there, in the light – it is safe, in the dark, or safer, anyway, but during the Old-day, when the magic that governs the logic of dreams begins to melt away, replaced by the stark, harsh reality of the sun’s ever-brightening rays, to remain would spell one’s doom.
We travelled here when the skins of our own world began to fall away; peel back to reveal the troubled bones that lay just underneath. (The bodies, buried in the dead of Old-night, that had sunk so far beneath the surface they began to appear here; a hint of smiling teeth in the curve of a cloud, a face hidden in the whorls of tree bark.)
Every evening, with the breaking of first light, I drink from my cup, and every morning, when darkness begins to fall, I retch it back up – its effects have faded by then, but one can never be too careful, here. In the darkness, I am safe, but the same light that would burn me alive given the chance is as sweet a siren song to me as it was to the fireflies of Before, and it is only my Restraint that keeps me from answering its call.
The problem, you see, is not waking up – it is remembering that you are asleep.
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