Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree Curves.
I am in a dark hall, wandering. The ceiling is low and the walls are made of stones, grayish and larger than my hands, with grout that’s blackened. This is an old place. The floor is either dirt or stone that’s as smooth as concrete.
I don’t feel the floor under my feet because I seem to be floating along the hall. I’m aware of a light at the end of this tunnel/hall but I’m not looking at it. Instead, I’m focused on the doors on either side of the hall.
To the left is a large wooden door with ironwork for hinges and handles. Light spills out from behind it. Bright, intensely bright light. There’s someone behind the door but I can’t see who it is. The light shines through on all sides, illuminating the darkness in the stone corridor.
Farther down the hall is another doorway. It’s open. I don’t even see a door. Just an opening in the stone. There’s a man in the doorway. It’s him. He stands there, sometimes leaning into the hall and looking back instead of looking forward toward the light somewhere at the other end of the corridor.
As I near him, I can see the glow around him. So much darkness around him that I can hardly see his face. He’s in a shirt and pants, hands outstretched to clasp the opening’s frame on either side and to keep his balance, so he neither plunges forward nor backward into the hallway but can’t go back into the room behind him.
He’s silhouetted against a huge furnace behind him. Lots of energy and fire…and heat. But the heat is so intense, he cannot stay here much longer. It spurs him to action but he still doesn’t move. The heat is comfortable and known, but it pushes him to move into the unknown of the corridor and he’s conflicted over leaving the safety of what he knows and leaping back into the movement stream of time inside the long hall.
I, in my floating state, am omnipresent, and I’m suddenly back at the first door, seeing the light around the edges and looking in the distance at the man in the doorway of the furnace room.
The closed door bursts open, falling flat into the hall, and light streams out from behind a woman in the doorway. I can’t see her face, but I recognize her. She’s the way I sometimes see myself in the astral: taller, thinner, longer hair, flow-y white dress that flutters at my ankles like curtains in the summer breeze. She’s me.
She’s also barefoot and has just kicked down the door that was holding her back.
She steps forcefully into the hall and I merge with her, feel her stalking purposefully down the hall. She/We reach the man in the doorway and don’t slow down. He waits until I am even with him and leaps into the corridor with us, taking my hand, running to match my stride. And then we’re running forward, hand in hand, not looking at the darkness behind us or any light ahead but at each other. And smiling. Neither of us has to walk this corridor alone.
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