8 Folded Limbs

~ II~ We moved every year when I was a child, oftentimes more than once a year. Part of this pattern was due to my mother's inability to resolve conflict, and another piece was my grandfather's strings of enabling on her. She moved several times when she was a child because her father was an active service member in the Army.  This meant that my mother could reinvent herself every time they moved, and it was usually across countries, so there was no trail of breadcrumbs for others to follow—no way for them to check her stories for accuracy. I spent my childhood hearing wild tales of adventure from my mother, and I was too young to question whether or not they were real or imagined.  That's the thing with inconsistency within one's self, people find ways to adapt to the lack of connection, and her way to seem more interesting than her peers was to make up wild stories each time they landed in a new country.  I began to question the wild stories that she told me at a youn...

 ~I~ I have always heard that dreams are the brain's way of making sense of the waking world. Many people study the landscape of dreams in an attempt to decipher deeper meaning within them. What happens when you can no longer distinguish the dream world from reality? Right before both sunset and sunrise, there is a phenomenon that I have come to know as the 'blue world' where the opacity of reality stutters slightly and the shapes and colors of this world lean toward a question. Looking at dawn and dusk photographs, it is usually difficult to decipher which one is represented in the picture, but they feel different in reality. Perhaps it is a characteristic of how the light hits the human eye or a change in the spectrum that does not exist on a screen emitting a mere representation of nature.  If dawn is a doorway, then dusk is its mirror, and doorways are something humans of all ages have celebrated with ritual and superstition. Every day the sun is born as the night dies,...