Antares

The airconditioning is humming tonight, the first in a while that we've needed it to suck the humidity. It's cool enough, just wet and the Possum doesn't sleep well under water. I don't like shutting all the windows for it, I can't hear the night and the wind sulks and won't play but the stillness and the rumbling of the vents make me sleep like the dead.

I have been dreaming a lot lately. Big, colourful, nonsensical dreams. I dreamed of a platypus the other night. Snakes another. Freud would have fun with the snakes, but I'm not sure how he'd react to platypi. The internet is not helpful. One site suggested it represented shyness, depression and negativity while another made innuendo regarding playfulness "downunder". I don't feel shy. Or negative. Or depressed. So I don't know what to make of it, though I remember being both surprised and completely at ease when accosted by a platypus.

I feel, if anything, wistful right now. Thinking of sweet things that tease the edges of memory and make me smile. Little snippets of a life well lived and a vague sense of... something.

There had been, in the centre of my chest, for some 3 years a beautiful bright kite that danced in the wind with streamers behind it against a bright and beautiful blue sky. And after flying high and battling the gusts it would occasionally crash to the ground with a sickening thud, and I would survey the damage, sometimes dispassionately, sometimes heartbroken, before running with the string behind me until the kite flew again. Veering drunkenly sometimes, but still fluttering with its beautiful tail. Then the last few times it fell, pieces were torn from it that can't be patched back, and then a little while ago, I stopped trying to see it flying and instead wrapped it up carefully and placed it away in a cupboard in my chest, leaving the remnants as intact as possible, not wanting to see any more torn off.

For some time, after I placed it in storage, I would have a memory of the bright colours and I would get a burning pain, right in the middle of my chest and I would fight the desperate urge to push it into the sky again, to prove that it could still fly. And maybe it can, but I refuse to tear any further strips off while trying to create something that has passed, I like the memories better.

The sky is very close tonight, and thick, tactile. I think the night gets lonely sometimes in Winter and longs for the endless Summer days when the sounds and the scents and the voices echo through her. Summer is still partying, but it is winding up, slowly. The music is playing but there are fewer dancers on the floor and the cool grey of Winter dawn is creeping around her edges.

I long for cooler days. I love the yellow dawns that wake me with brightness and heat and getting out in the rich sultry air before anyone else wakes and the way the wet humid Earth smells as I cross it, but I want even more the sensation of cool air slapping me awake and the thin cool greyness that slides over bare limbs and strokes it alive. I love the silver of the Winter night and the pure white glow of the stars and the moon. I love my Antares, twinkling away with her ruby glow in the heart of the scorpion dangerous and beautiful.

On a night long ago, I remember being disorientated as I got off a bus near midnight and had to stumble home through darkened streets that passed a cemetery. Being an imaginative 16 year old the sounds of night terrified me and I wished more than ever to be safe at home, not stumbling over the streets of suburban Geneva. But through the clouds that covered the sky for most of the time I was there, the moon came out, and just above the horizon the familiar whip tail of the Scorpion was visible and I was not afraid any more.

Some decade later, climbing off a bus onto a busy side road of another city far from home, the frigid wind curled around my exposed wrists and neck and made me shiver in spite of myself. I felt lost, and discombobulated and not sure which direction I should head, struggling with my internal compass as I crossed the overpass over the steady traffic, avoiding the pool of urine against concrete. As I looked up the sky was clear and in spite of the light pollution that faded the night towards the margins like a streaky watercolour, I still found her in the sky, my red star, following my heart.

I don't need a platypus in a dream to tell me that I feel lost again and in need of guidance, and somehow it feels as if the Winter will provide me that. I feel some sort of hope in my chest and assurance that great things are in store for this year, if I am patient and work hard and am humble. I do not know if I will fly again so high as I used, or if my colours will be so bright, but there is something new in me now, a strength that I never before knew I possessed, and a determination. A thread of something shining, and never broken that keeps on looking forward. And I know, somehow, that that will be rewarded this year, and my star will lead me home.