Visions of a Nazarene
I had a dream about this mystic of a city. The scarlet presented on the roof tiles illuminates and shifts my focus, like that same shade was not once of a bloody, staining association. It heals every chamber of my heart. I recall not if I had seen it prior in my dreams when I was an infant, or whether it accompanied me the moment my mother pushed me out to see the light.
I remember, however, I visited it in my dreams in 2018 on the 25th of December. I was fifteen. My dream bore no restrictions to my physical body and it appeared as if the city had just casted out any form of impurity. My dream carried the upcoming of the Messiah, and unknowingly, it was me.
I wonder what Christ would feel when he sees his city now. I wonder if he, too, wouldn’t be able to pass through as checkpoints would never discriminate between man and prophet. If time were to freeze and simultaneously rewind, would Mary be able to birth the messenger of God? Bethlehem can only carry one letter between the shed of violence and blood. Would it be received? Had an angel aided them both in carriage and flight, then of what use would a womb and limbs be?
The city blooms solely when I am there, not because I am the creator of its name, but because it is the creator of mine and the origin of my glory. It holds my darling memory: the beginning of everything. Nothing has existed before. Nothing has existed before. And for a void to exist, wouldn’t there be an opposite equivalence to assert this idea of an existing void?
Nazareth was the beginning of everything. It holds my grandfather’s short-lived childhood and my parents’ stolen ones. It carries my untold secrets and web of complex dreams. It asserts my interwoven reality. Nazareth is a naked body, forbidden to be inspected, to be outlined. Even upon touch, intruders must never enter. It is the purity that is the beginning of everything. It is the force that weeps and never sleeps.
My dream beholds me immortal as I stand before this city of heritage and opulent ancestry. I am this city just as much as it is the human that is me, which conflicts and inserts my identity into one and many: The mortal and the divine. I cannot be a carrier of patrimony had I not been chosen by Nazareth. This intimacy is out of reach; not even lovers of fancy infatuation can be of such hold. A link that is to be understood by one that is oneself- that is not to be acquired, even if through a stranger’s clairvoyance.
This inherent regeneration of creation through the cycle of soil and clay bears the significance of a humanness of an empyreal kind. The empire that shalt never know ruins, the sword that needs not to be reminded of sharpening. If I were made of clay, then it is only natural that I am a disciple of your soil. Your particles and mine merge to form one being, though I will forever be born from your rib.
My sisters and brother are that of the same fate- and that is why your flawless creation always comes back to serve your holiness.
Nazareth, you are the crown I will wear when the softest parts of my flesh get nailed.
Nazareth, you are the cloud I hold onto as I ascend to the seventh sky.
May your soil cultivate the most ravishing flowers in my name, for the sake of your beloved beauty before it is for mine tomb.
You will never forget my grave, even if my body were to reside in a foreign land, and anything other than you shalt be of foreign association.
I will slip back, crawl back to you.
That is all that I know.
Such a dream is of little visit to my psyche for a reason. It beseeches I replay every memory of nothingness so that I can replant hills, churches and mosques hand in hand. I fear that if I were to dream about you tonight, then I wouldn’t have capacity for new memories when and after I wake up. You would overpower every thought, every doubt, any and everything of temporal nature. You were not shaken when civilizations were fighting with dust, so how could my memory betray your existence?
You, who has seen your trees be turned into crosses and your ground be ploughed for silver coins. You, who has seen devotion and treason. You, who has seen clones and false messiahs. You, whose burning never occurred to the Romans even when they were consumed by the blinding grudge they upheld for the son you embraced in boyhood.
