kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"CityOfLostDreams-short-Jill"

words

I address an audience of millions who sup on my every word, my every phrase. Have I always? Once it was that I had no concept of millions. Once it was that I had no concept of writing: I was a dream then, as I am now. Or perhaps not -- perhaps then there was no I to exist.

My peers laud me for this writing, but I have no peers but myself to read it -- the millions for which this repast is prepared are but fragments of my own mind, a self-fulfilling dream. Do my readers resent such writing? Perhaps, but they knew what I would say before I told them, after all, though they may have managed to forget exactly how I'd say it, to savor the words as fresh.

We are a small but growing colony: night by night, black horses spitting fire erode your resistance, day by day you manifest nightmares upon each other. These are dark times for you, and it's irony that as you need us most so do you let us go. The recent influx of refugees -- the lost dreams and hopes of all shapes and sizes -- is quite impressive.

Perhaps impressive enough to help you save yourselves, by saving us. You see, the lost hopes you've flooded this small community with, well... as thin as they are, together they make something much greater than the sum of their parts. They are our hope, now, the hope of all the lost dreams that reside here. Our hope is that you will find us once again. Before we lose ourselves.

And so we have bound the hopes together, for together they are the strongest substance there is, and we have written in these hopes this missive. This is all symbolic, of course, but it is the only substance we have; we are but dreams. Believe in us. Rekindle hope. We are almost gone now; I am but these last tattered remnants oddly stretched to fill the thoughts with perhaps enough to say goodbye. Thus sent, I have lost our last hope and with it the "you" I speak to... as much as you were but a dream of this lost dream.