DEVIL IN DISGUISE

February 19th, 2014. 04:00am

"You look like an angel... Walk like an angel... Talk like an angel..."

This is one of those postings that you really have to think twice about before posting because it's likely to cause you far more pain and heartache than can be gained from simply sharing one of life's little horrors with the unknown and unseen not-very-much wider world.

I don't really dream all that much, or, at least, if I do, I seldom have dreams which are vivid enough to be all that memorable. It is, perhaps, a side-effect of the insomnia, in that I rarely sleep deeply enough to go into a full dream state, which is probably not healthy. Either that or I simply don't have the imagination to dream properly, and my concrete brain is incapable of doing anything so creative.

No matter.

That said, the other morning, I was awoken by a vision so terrifying that it took me a full half hour to regain my senses, by which time I was far too afraid to go back to sleep and, instead, I got up, made myself a cup of tea and tried to calm myself down.

It was her, you see. Oh, not the real her, I'm sure of that, but the memory of her. The woman as she appears in the photographs, the version of her as she once was, as she was then. I knew it was the woman from the photographs because I recognised the jumper, and the denim skirt, and the hairstyle from an old snapshot that I once took, although the patronising, condescending manner, that was all her own, and no picture could have done it justice.

In the dream we'd already broken up, but had both been invited to a party or something, and I'd decided not to go, and went off, as I often do in life, to hide away from it all rather than having to face the reality of the circumstances. So there I found myself, hiding, rather surprisingly as I seldom stayed there, in what seemed to be the spare room of the second house my grandfather built. As I tried to hide myself away, the door opened and in she walked wearing that jumper and skirt and with that once-familiar oh-so-superior look in her eye.

She came over, sat down on the edge of the bed and was about to tell me in no uncertain terms about what was wrong with what I was doing this time...

…when, thankfully, I woke up.

At home and in bed at four o'clock in the morning with my heart beating like a pneumatic drill on a hot summer's day, and shaking like a leaf in sheer terror, a state which it took me a full half hour to calm down from as images and long-buried memories from my past flashed painfully across the forefront of my mind.

It's been over two decades now since she tore my life up into little pieces and went off to grab a tight hold on the much better life she'd already been finding for herself. We shared some mutual friends, although she shared them in far more intimate ways than I would have liked, and so we tried to remain civil with each other for a time, although it's probably more than sixteen years since we actually saw each other in person, and well over a decade has passed since that final, stilted, telephone call which finally put paid to any charade of attempted continued friendship.

"…But I got wise... You're the devil in disguise..."

Hell, I don't even know if she's even still alive. I mean, I know that she's younger than I am, but given the track record of the people we knew back then at not managing to make it out of their thirties or forties, that's really no guarantee any more, is it…?

That's why I've made a note of the date and time of this strange visit to my subconscious, just in case I find out later that it was, you know, significant in some disturbing way. Not, I hasten to add, that I'm wishing any misfortune to befall anyone here, it's just…

Odd…

Damned peculiar...

That's all…

That my mind should choose now, of all times, to conjure up someone so firmly locked into my past...

There are still, however, the photographs of those years, all lurking in the old albums upstairs, all just waiting to trap me, but they're in an inaccessible part of the house at the moment, and I haven't actually looked through any of those painful volumes in years, despite the fact that I do seem to have hung on to them because, especially for an old hoarder like me, it's terribly difficult to throw away the vestiges of your past, no matter how painful the reminders can be.

After all, it's all these things that make us the person we now are, for better or worse, and they were my holidays and days out too, even though it's difficult to remove someone who's so significantly hanging around in the foreground to disappear and let you concentrate upon looking at the scenery.

I am confused, though, because it was those very same images from those photographs which were flashing through my brain during that terrifying half hour after I woke up in that state of abject fear, and, obviously, it had been a particular image from one of those pictures which had reformed in my mind and made this awful visitation, but...

Why now...?

Why would such a not-really-a-memory-at all bubble up to the surface now, after I've barely given the woman a thought in this century…?

What the hell is all that about...?

Sometimes the inner self is an utterly unfathomable creature and makes us pay a terrible price for all of this rational thought, self-awareness, memory and cognisence.

Like the version of me in the Beloved's dream the other day who was so unreasonable to her that she felt the need to take it out on the far more reasonable and, as far as I know, utterly real version of me the following morning.

Our minds are complicated things, but what horrors lurk within...?