The Circle of Willis

In that dream, everything burns in flames and ashes except one stunningly beautiful photoperiodic poinsettia, impervious to it all.

Molten lava enveloped the surroundings in an ounce of glamour, with wit, allusion and transference, a doppelganger cut from the same cloth represented a new lease on life. Those soulful eyes in the distance, they shared my same ancestral gene. A new vessel and a coffin birth in the valley of fire.

Never underestimate a creature who is not meant to live and breathe on this planet. Never underestimate a being who was buried alive and freed oneself. Never underestimate the power of an earthly seed… There is an explosion of crimson when two stars merge, and you rejoice for you are now dead… but I, my dear stranger, am now the dead living. My soul is but a shadow of what it once was. Had that not happened on that fateful day, not only would I not be here, I would also not be me. I would not be the same person I am today. Not even remotely close.

You will never find anyone like me, because I am already dead, the soul of a mere afterimage that lives on. Who you are, my afterimage, is your blessing and your curse, woven with the strands of time. Do not dream, despair, and die aimlessly. Those cold dead eyes, as they emerged through the fire, stole my soul away. Some dreams are not meant to come true in this world, and thus my world crumbled into one million pieces.

Tethered in essence and soul… sowing the seeds of doubt to the wings of supremacy and deconstruction, you are now free. Free to abscond this malevolent place, free to walk away as the ashes recede from thy eyes. Free to live on with or without me.

From a sinister darkness the greatest light is born. Old thoughts and habits die hard, but die they must. Letting go of what you had always loved, the smouldering crimson ashes, the echoless silent scream, which was not just a dream, it was not intangible, it was very real.

Concocting a potion is like fashioning the beginning of a story. Imagination knows no bounds. The exquisite chameleon blended in the crowd imbibing new sights and smells I was never to know. A shell of my former self, drifting in space straddled in between the instertice of two realms… The past and the present. I am a captive. Little did I know then that the seeds I threw away and buried that fateful day were to sprout when I least expected.

"I do not believe that this world can be redeemed."

Phoebe… die and live not, live and die not.

"Catapulted through time and place to find yourself—you will only regain knowledge of who you really were if you can recognise your soul in another. You will know when you see her, for she is your other you."

Dream a dream, little one… an endless dream and lose your identity.

I just remember a brief glimpse of castle ruins in the moonlight, nothing else.

***

In another corner of the world, Olivia picked flowers in full bloom from her garden and proceeded to play around with flowery embellishments. She placed a bouquet of flowers in front of the empty space with no furniture, recently left empty after descending in disastrous marriage. There were empty spaces scattered throughout the house, which once housed the possessions of her gay husband. She sighed, craving the taste of her homeland, whilst also missing her brother.

Someplace under the rainbow, Chloe wrote "6-methoxykaempferol-3-O-β-D-robinobioside" on the whiteboard with two exclamation marks next to it. A girl with stellar grades, tenacity, and spirit. She also playfully joked around with a most beautiful girl also sitting in the room, who was actually a boy in disguise. One computer was turned on showing a bioinformatics database. Scholarly journals were kept in the side-drawers and old pipettes and beakers were seen in the other half-open drawer.

Up south, Janet, wondered about the microscopic letters in the eyes of the Mona Lisa, from some 500 years ago. Whilst writing a commentary on the teasing smile, pigment mix, and the Isleworth portrait gem she longed for a vacation by the river as she sipped freshly made coffee during the terribly cold weather.

Further north another girl was concurrently running late for school as they called out her name in the distance “Aclasta” and she waved with one hand, whilst the other hand held a sandwich next to her mouth. From potassium permanganate to biological catalysts, she spent long hours in those school labs and library to stay away as long as possible from her orphanage. The hues of the chemical reactions mixing in the test tubes of her school science experiments were the only specks of light in her present existence. She worked round the clock hoping to find some leads with respect to a cure for her friend’s sickness. The book Anne of Green Gables was her most prized possession.

***

Tainted faces, tainted places, shrouded in mist. It is a lonely planet, we are each lost in a worlds of our own. Stranded in between the real space, digital space, historic and imaginative spaces.

A man called Vincenzo Perrugia is said to have once stolen the Mona Lisa painting, but what stole my memories from me, I do not know. No prescription medicine seems could give them back. These visons could be mere drug-induced tripping or reflections and echoes in a well. I felt like a mere pair of eyes trapped immobile in a portrait.

You come to realise a lot about enzymes and catalysts, and that there is no catalyst for happiness. The blood, the sweat and tears could not bring back what had been lost forever, could not undo time, which cannot be unwound.

What if your whole life was just a mere illusion? What is you were already dead and are now just dreaming yourself away to infinity? I lost my identity?…but did I ever have one to begin with?

My head was heavy, my heart ached and I was very sleepy. Was this my journey? Was this was my place, my destination? Did I have any?

Old nightmares may sometimes resurge in the subconscious seabed. Something stirred an emphatic inner dimension. In the meantime, the lab rats ran aimlessly in the twilight, unknowingly developing osteosarcoma.

If everything hinges on correct recognition, I would repeat the experiments countlessly to countercheck test-retest reliability. Composing a letter to my formal self was alas a temporal impossibility. One of those four girls held the key to my binary solvent. Locating her would mean coming full circle; this is my cell cycle.

Sometimes the steepest roads lead to the most beautiful places. Somatic cell nuclear transfer gives everything a different light. It perfuses the brain with imagination of limitless possibility but there is also fear… fear of the unknown.

However, I did sense a sort of Warburg effect. Energy was being produced, but not in a normal fashion, as Aclasta approached. There was a beautiful familiar ring to that name, "Aclasta", subtle and nostalgic like a drop of dew on a poinsettia.

I thought I may intuitively know which girl it is, but then again there was no scientific substance to that claim. A strong wish. No grim absolutes.