Touch of Reality

She is walking on a ledge. It looks familiar. It takes him a minute to realize that it is the ledge outside his office window. He watches her through the open window – a window he always presumed could not be opened.

At first he thinks she does not know that he is there.

Then just as he is about to turn away,

"Vince." She says, twisting her upper body to look at him while retaining her balance, feet firmly planted on the ledge.

He woke up then and realized she had never called him by name during the time they were around each other. She just never said it. Not Vincent, especially not Vince. He wondered why. Then he told himself it did not really matter.

When he went to work that day, he tried to open the window in his cubicle.

Just as he thought – it was sealed shut.

"What is it you really want?" He asks her as they sit by the shimmering river, beneath the starless night sky.

She thinks for a while. Then she looks at him and smiles, a soft sad smile. "I want to believe."

Sometimes the dreams were brief. Sometimes they lasted till he woke up in the morning, bleary and reborn.

He did not really know what to make of them. There was no reason for him to dream of her. He was not in love with her, not even substantially attracted to her, and did not even see her anymore.

Theirs were a series of brief interactions over an even briefer period of time that sprung both from professional circumstance as well as a mutual inclination to be around each other, resulting in her mistaking his friendly behavior for something more.

But it had been settled. They never spoke or saw each other since.

Till these dreams began. At first he was alarmed. But after a while he got used to them, so much so that he took comfort in them – they became a safe place he could retreat to. Sometimes at the end of a particularly long and miserable day, as he rested his head on the pillow, waiting for sleep to come, he found himself wishing silently, almost unconsciously to dream of her.

And because of the dreams, during his waking hours, he found himself trying to remember, recollect moments they had together, be it conversations or shared glances of amusement at someone else's antics or just sitting together in some sort of semblance to a comfortable silence usually shared by two people long familiar with each other.

He remembered once being frustrated and tired out and pacing in front of his boss' office waiting to go into to see him. She had been there and though she usually did not initiate conversations with him, that one time she caught his eye and asked, "Long day?"

That was the thing about her – even though half the time he felt as if she was looking down on all of them from her lofty perch with those judging eyes that rendered him an immature idiot, there were moments like this, where she was all genuine concern and sweetness, making him think of hand stitched curtains, matching teacup sets and a warm snuggly patchwork quilt.

So following the tug of his heart, he told her. How tired he was and no it wasn't the job itself, it was just all the red tape that made his days seems long and hard and how he supposed he should be used to it by now.

And for that moment, as he spoke, like so many other moments he had recently ever since all his friends had begun settling down, he could not help but think that was what it must be like to have a wife.

He would have gone on talking but the secretary interrupted to let him know his boss was waiting to see him.

Maybe it was that - his own loneliness and the small degree of comfort that she brought him which ignited these dreams.

"I'm not easy to live with, you know." She says to him.

They are on the beach, sitting on the sand, watching the waves up ahead. It looks like night but he somehow knows it is not.

He is sure it is early in the morning and the sun will rise in two hours or less.

Or maybe he just wants it to be because he's always loved sunrise and he wants to share this one with her.

"Neither am I." He tells her.

"I know." She says, smiling, that knowing look in her eyes, the knowledge of him contained in the way her lips curves upwards at each end and he wonders momentarily if he could gain that very insight by capturing her mouth in his.

"That's why for people like us it's always better in theory than in practice."

As she speaks, she rises to her feet and takes a couple of steps forward, in the direction of the sea.

She pauses, turns to look at him, make sure his eyes are on her and then she does something he does not expect, not from a girl like her, not even in his dreams.

In one fluid movement, she slips her flimsy and flowy dress, just like the ones he used to see her around in, over her head and discards it onto the sand.

She glances at him over her bare shoulder.

"What?" She asks for he is, naturally, staring.

"Nothing." He says.

He watches her walk towards the water and he thinks about how sometimes beauty can be found in the most unexpected places, like in the naked vulnerability of imperfection.

That was the last dream he had of her. They stopped for a long time and soon he even began to forget about it.

Then one day, years later, he saw her

It was at a charity gala event. The woman he was dating was into that sort of thing. He never did see the point. But he liked her quite a bit so there was no point kicking a fuss either.

He recognized her from the back. He just knew it was her and without thinking he found himself moving towards her.

As he came to a slow halt beside her, he had the feeling he was dreaming all over again, still asleep in his bed, far from the customary emptiness of his waking life.

She turns around to glance at him and he sees that her stomach is noticeably bigger. She is pregnant, he realizes with a start. But remarkably, other than that, she looks exactly as he remembered. Young, fresh faced, sweet smile and scrutinizing eyes.

She recognizes him almost immediately and they exchange pleasantries.

"Shekar," She beckons a man standing nearby.

"This is my husband." She says to him.

He's handsome, decent looking man. They shake hands, polite smiles.

"This is Vincent. I used to work with him." She tells her husband.

He looks at her, watches her with this man.

I'm in love with you, he wants to tell her even though he knows it is not true. If anything he is in love with the girl who haunted him in his dreams all that time ago for reasons he could never really fathom or grasp.

But now, here she was in the flesh and all he wants to do is say something that will make her leave the man standing beside her. There is nothing wrong with him except that he is average and normal – everything she isn't.

"How have you been? What have you been up to?" She asks as Shekar departs to bring her a drink.

He does not answer her. Instead he reaches forward and tucks a curl behind her ear.

"I'm glad you didn't change your hair." He finds himself saying.

There is a look in her eyes as she stares up at him, takes in his words, his gesture, and him.

He remembers then how he felt when he found out that she might possibly like him. He had found it incredulous. Not just because of how young she was. Never in her interactions with him had she ever indicated any such emotion. She had been so guarded and restrained and just like that, she had been into him all that time.

He feels the same way now – that look in her eyes, that gives it all away. He wonders why he had never seen that look before, why he had never looked into her eyes and refused to let her look away so that he could see the depth of her feelings for him.

"Why didn't you?" He asks.

One end of her lips turn up in the beginning of a smirk, as her eyes shine with mirth. "So that you'd be able to recognize me."

He smiles, shaking his head at her, bemused. She is mocking him. And there he was, reading too much into things.

She glances to the right and he follows her gaze. Her husband is beckoning her.

She nods and then turns to him. "I should go." She says, smiling politely.

He nods and smiles. "Sure. Catch you later."

She smiles back and just before she turns to walk away, she takes a step towards him and leans up so that her lips are barely an inch away from his ear.

"Just because it's in your head doesn't mean it's not real."

Her whispered words echo even as he watches her walk away from him and he knows this is what happens to men who cross the paths of girls like her, girls who fall in love with their whole heart and leave it behind to trap those clueless men for the rest of their confused lives so that maybe, just maybe, in their next life when a woman gives them her heart, they will finally be able to know what to do with it.

FIN

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