Somnambulist

This story started with a dream and it ended with a dream. The dream at the beginning wasn’t really a dream, so to speak. It may as well have been one. It smelled like a dream, it looked like a dream and it felt like a dream.

I met this particular dream during my last year of high school. She was perfect. With perfect auburn hair, perfect brown eyes and the sprinkling of little freckles on her nose that killed me every time I looked at her perfect face. What can I say? I was in love with her before I knew what was going on. I think that a lot of guys were interested in her. She was mysterious, sexy and adorable naturally, without even trying. She was effortless, mysterious beauty incarnate. I was also pretty sure that she was way out of my league. Yeah, I felt something for her. Back then it just seemed like a hopeless idea.

Regardless I soon realized that, hopeless or not, I had a craving to be with her that chewing gum and patches just couldn’t get rid of. I was in a few classes with her. I would always make so many excuses to talk to her. I would sometimes manufacture the dumbest reasons just to have a short conversation with her before the next class. Of course I was never very smooth around her. I was never suave but even when I was stammering like an idiot being close to her and talking to her was like oxygen to me.

And one day while I was talking to her about something stupid or another she leaned forward and she kissed me. She pulled back and looked up at me with her big brown eyes. She got a feeling from me, she said, she couldn’t really describe it but she couldn’t ignore it either. I was quite positive that I was actually sleeping and having a dream until I stubbed my toe two hours later.

We kept our relationship discreet. She was having some pretty nasty home trouble and her parents finding out about me wouldn’t help anything. Only a few people even knew that anything was going on. It was our secret.

As for her, she remained impossible to understand all at once. She was the enigma that I lived to explore and discover. Sometimes there were days when we wouldn’t meet or speak at all. I would begin to wonder if the entire thing had really been just a dream after all but then, at the end of the day, she would spring out of the shadows in a hall I thought was empty. She would push me against the lockers, kissing me. She would stare into my eyes, her freckled nose touching mine. She always said: “your eyes are like water.”

One night we were at a party and the power went out. The room plunged into total, noisy darkness. Without seeing I knew that it was her who appeared out of the blackness and kissed me forcefully and with purpose. By the time the power returned and the lights came back on we were already long gone into the night. See, I remember that night so clearly because that was the last night that I spent with her. What can I really say? All dreams have to end, eventually. The more beautiful the dream, the harder it becomes to wake up and face reality.

Later that night, when I took her back to her house, she had me drop her two blocks away to avoid the parental suspicion. I kissed her one last time and then drove away, too euphoric to notice the car that passed me a little bit too fast.

The next morning one of her best friends called me, I could barely understand her over her tears. I hung up quickly. Soon I was in tears too. I cried so hard that some big part of me died, killing my emotions and filling every drop of my blood with the silent, motionless memory of a dream that ended too soon.

The funeral further shredded my mind but my face wouldn’t move and my eyes wouldn’t cry. I was awake now.

‘So this is real?’ I thought.

For a long time I was like that. I was like a robot going through waking life without a care for anything. I visited her grave only once. I stayed there for hours as I stared blankly at the words etched into the hard, gray stone. I wasn’t ready to wake up.

“You know, your eyes are like ice,” someone told me a long time after the funeral. I was no longer happy, no longer a healthy person. I was unstable and didn’t care that I was failing all of my classes and that my friends had stopped trying to help me. I just kept remembering that she was gone.

That night I dreamed I was back in that empty hall. She was there in my dream, her freckled nose touching mine. “You are so sad,” she told me. “That makes me sad too, it makes me really sad. So I want you to promise me that you’ll find a way to be happy and to remember the happy times, okay? Please, can you? For me?”

I promised her that I would. I think that I knew that it was a dream. I think I knew that I would wake up from it. When I did wake up it was still hard but I found that I was finally able to cry. I never believed in spirits and I never believed in prophetic dreams. I still don’t. What the dream told was that it’s important to always remember but it’s also important to move on.

So when you wake up in the morning and remember a beautiful dream you had, don’t be sad that it’s over, be happy that you had it. Can you do that? For her?