Chimney Sweep 1

“Chimney sweep,” I think that was the word or maybe it wasn’t a word at all but something hovering in the air of the dream where I stood on a narrow street or maybe on a rooftop, everything dim and older than memory, the sky pale, the air thick with smoke and vines crawling across forgotten chimneys, and ahead of me there was someone — or maybe it was me — a shape turned away, shoulders dark against the faint blue light, the outline shifting, flickering between person and structure until the difference stopped mattering and the head glowed faintly, nearly blank, washed of all features, while the rest of the body shimmered with fragments of rooftops and bricks and leaves as if the world had pressed its history into skin, and I remember the feeling of watching something that wasn’t still but wasn’t moving either, the sense that the city itself had built the figure from pieces of what it remembered or wanted to forget, the background breathing in soft layers of gray and blue, each one sliding past the other like time refusing to hold still, and I thought how strange it was that there was no real face because faces belonged to waking life, not this, where identity was only residue, a trace of someone who had already blended into the walls, and the buildings weren’t behind the figure but inside it, alive in the cracks, whispering in the slow rhythm of rooftops and plaster, the silence pressing in, peaceful and heavy, and I felt that it was all trying to say something about how we dissolve into the places we live, how those places keep pieces of us long after we’ve gone, how every vine and chimney and faded wall carries what we forget, and when I woke, that feeling lingered — that I was both the figure and the city, that there had never been a line between them, that remembering and being were just two names for the same thing.