Friday 6 March 2009

too soon - a warning

I woke up in what looked like a big commercial space in the process of being divided into three apartments, basically one on top of the other. I was excited and very eager to go downstairs to view the ground floor apartment as that was the one in which I was hoping to live. I ventured down to the middle level where various members of my family and my partner were gathered, making breakfast. From the makeshift kitchen, we could see into the building structures of each apartment: the wall frames, the flooring and so on. It was evident that they were not yet finished. Still feeling excited, I ran across the cement floor to go down to the next level. The floor stopped suddenly with no walls or railing to prevent anyone from falling over the edge into the vast open space below, and the stairs similarly had no railing on either side. Nonetheless, I started running down the stairs, still keen to see the ground floor apartment. A short way down, I realised that not only was the building incomplete, but the stairs were unfinished and extremely precarious. They began to buckle slightly under my weight and the wooden stairs, like rungs on a ladder, were dangerously flimsy. I began to slowly back up the stairs, shifting my body carefully. Toward the top, I could see that the screws that held the entire staircase (which was now much more like a badly made ladder) to the cement floor at the top, were inching out of their holes. My mother saw that I was distressed and walked across the cement floor to help me. She sat down on the edge and looked over into the huge space below, some distance to the ground floor. I warned her to go back, that it was dangerous, but the cement floor on which she sat turned into thin plywood and began to bend under her weight plus mine on the ladder, dragging it down. My mother did her best to cling to the edge but the slope was too steep and she simply lost her grip and disappeared into the void, heading toward the cement floor far below. It was too traumatic and I woke up.

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