another place

When I am tired of being ill, of being afraid of being ill, of being away from the person I used to know as myself, I close my eyes and pretend that I have already died.
I have already died. Time no longer signifies. The cruel needles, their recent memory, become unreal. Lost love, friends gone, become suddenly a kind of quiet sound, like a low wind in the forest, dancing around me, in the darkness. The faces and bodies transform: they turn into huge birds fying silently over restful silvery lakes, into swift creatures whose shapes I can barely discern moving among the trees in the snowed in woods of my mind.
There is an island in the middle of one of those lakes so hidden in the wilderness that they are akin to secret thoughts. A long time ago I stood on the shore and looked at it rise in the mist across the water. I had an inkling there, a premonition, of something that would happen to me in the future. It had to do with loss and distance, longing and impossibility. I felt something like a living spirit waver in the air around that island, and had a revelation. There were many worlds within the world, and countless ways in which the soul might feel each one of them. I recognised that when the pain became too great, when the void became too real, I would be able to go to that island. It is a wild place, away from all the expectations, lies and fear we have created. It is perhaps a mad place, inhabited by an old, humorous god who never gets too serious about anything, who drinks and laughs a lot. I told about this palce to many people who really cared about me, and they all insisted I should never go there, and liked me less for mentioning it. It was really like something they would never think, much less talk about for fear of looking ridiculous or undignified.
But I close my eyes now and I see the island, in the distance, behind a veil of snow...
It puts a smile on my face.