Bienvenida, mija de luz

she’s watching me. those brown irises follow me, and though i lock eyes with the pillars, the chapel walls, the grasses waving just beyond, i can’t shake her. i call her sunflower girl, this figment of my dreams. 

“have you ever fallen in love?” she asks. leaving the stone steps, i ignore her question. i gave up talking to the voices in my head a long time back. “i think i might love you,” she continues. 

“you don’t know what love is,” i want to say. i stop myself. in the midst of the field, caterpillar weeds poke their seedy noses through dead brush and wildflowers. i gave myself permission to pluck the greens during the height of summer. yet sunflower girl’s soft gaze accuses me of leaving too many flowers out here to die of hypothermia. 

she tramples the grass just behind me, her perfume wafting over my shoulder. “i think you love me too.”

i need to confront her. resolve the matter immediately. “I…” 

She waits. Damn her. 

Then I’m falling, her heart pounding in my open palms. I see the outlines of her scars with the vibrant overlap of the neurologists who mapped the first complete neural brain network. Every book comes to the sidelines of my mind, thousands of pages ready to draw her inspiration from. 

She needs a name. You can’t just call her Sunflower Girl. She needs a friend. She isn’t here to rescue you. She needs you to love her. 

i push her and the dancing and the books aside. “i am not a writer anymore,” i say. the grasses flutter, wind catching its swoosh through their touch. lake brine replaces her scent, and i know she will return another time. 

i settle back onto the step. typically by now, i’d have completed my meditation and physically returned to the surface worlds. yet, i stay. 

i fear i will see her again when i leave. she’ll return to my dreams in promises of a great glade that will set me free. a place to pursue her in. a place she and the others may all be free together, yet still attend my stories. she told me they wanted to hear them. she asked why i didn’t trust anyone. she asked if i’m afraid of everything or just failure. 

never mind, i return my thoughts to the wind. waves lap in the distance. somewhere, Kyomi roars. 

Dancing around a firepit, wandering through the darkness in the middle of the night, one fist clenched above the Gulf of Mexico, tear-shaken time with a friend, wildflowers in forgotten fields, laughter late at night, excruciating morning wake-ups, imitating a character currently beloved, curled into a ball with a book and a pen, creating thousands and thousands of stories…

I can’t leave it. Someone must put words to the tales. 

I open my eyes and find myself in thick woods. Someone has arranged boulders into a semi-circle, and the Sunflower Girl leans from atop the centermost. 

“Welcome to the glade, greenie.”