BORN OF STARDUST AND THE SEA_WHO AM I?

The ghost of Samuel Clemens here.

Roland gave his word to enter the GUESS MY CHARACTER BLOGFEST

http://jennifer-daiker.blogspot.com/2010/07/guess-that-character-blogfest.html

I stood in for him and asked the woman who scares me as much as Death to write the entry:


I am Dream. I am Nightmare. I am Legend.

I was born of stardust and the sea ... the second time.

For me to tell you of my first birth would be your death. Not that I am adverse to the death of humans. Far from it.

Do you want to hear of it? I thought not.

But talk of it has sparked images of home.

No alien shore in all this world has any strong deep charm for me but those sands made from the crushed skulls of my kind's enemies.

For me its balmy airs are still blowing, its summer seas yet flashing in the setting sun.

In my nostrils still breathes the breath of flowers long dead in Babylon's fabled gardens -- flowers I brought to it from my ... home.

My thoughts are not your thoughts. My ways are not your ways. I do not envy you your stunted vision.

I have smiled down from my throne upon Aztec natives as they bore me screaming sacrifices. I taught Nero the tune he played to the roaring fires that roasted his helpless subjects.

Proud shoguns cowered before me when they called me Empress Himiko. Soon I tired of their little island nation, tired of their jade statues of me.

I rode down shrieking peasants as I scattered the seeds which bore the Black Death among them. The resultant chaos plowed their graves into fertile soil for my kind to flourish.

But over these past two hundred years, I have grown soft. Whenever I would give sway to the passions burning within me, I felt the sad eyes of my husband upon me. My misguided, naive, noble husband.

And I found myself becoming the hero he was, the hero he thought me to be. The fool.

The decade before we met, he named his restaurant, CASA, home. It was a gift from a wealthy woman grateful for her life he saved.

When we married, he changed its name to mine, making it a place of music.

His smile seemed to glow from his heart when he told me, "I really didn't change the name, for you are home to me."

And sentimental cow that I had become, I wept. No wonder I left him and New Orleans.

Then, why do I feel the ghost of his lips on mine and an empty ache in a heart that felt so full when his arms were around me?
***
Samuel Clemens, ghost, here. For those of you who wonder what Roland saw in Marlene, here is something that might help explain :