You never really expect them, you know?
The cognitive ability to dream is among the most transcendental, nonpareil privileges bestowed upon us as humans. One that’s often taken for granted. Dreams can be beautiful, beautiful experiences; illusory escapes from reality, states of superior sentience, sources of unprecedented insight. But to dream is also to be at one’s most vulnerable. Because who’s more proficient and better-equipped to destroy you, than yourself? They can metamorphose into night terrors within seconds, inflicting levels of affliction very few parts of the waking world can match. For as long as you’re asleep, at least.
Dreamers of the night wake by dawn only to be disappointed (and on occasion, relieved), realizing what they believed was real was no more than a mere fabrication of the mind. But dreamers of the day belong to a class of their own. Of our own. As intelligent beings, there’s an intrinsic, sui generis sense of control we experience when daydreaming. While there is no conscious ability to intervene or manipulate the events that transpire, we do influence them. And we do so with open eyes.
There’s a magic in dreaming while the sun’s still out. She was that magic.
Educators stand adamant behind the belief that dreaming is meant for the night, and night alone, but that’s mainly because they’re awful at their jobs. Regardless of the appropriateness of their timing, there’s a sense of idealism to be acknowledged. Your wants, your desires, all encompassed within mental manifestations of seemingly flawless scenarios. Utter perfection, propagated throughout the meandering recesses of your psyche. Effortlessly.
The innate authority that accompanies dreaming while awake lies not in itself, but in the potential to make it possible. But when those gorgeous landscapes, that beautiful hair, and that stunning smile materialize before your eyes, and you aren’t dreaming any longer, what are you to do?
She was like a headline marquee that scrolled across the 7 o’clock news. I only caught a handful of words before she was on her way. I knew if I was patient, she’d return. But those fragmented clauses stuck with me all day. A thought I needed to decipher.
She was as quaint as an old Italian villa, as immersive as the waters of Venice; as beautifully constructed as the colosseum, as amaranthine as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. She was as abstract as da Vinci’s mirror writing, and as invaluable as Galileo’s telescope.
She was as fascinating as faded letters on a page of a leather-bound book. Illegible to most. But if you paid keen attention to them, eventually those reticent remnants formed sentences.
She was like the last twenty-two seconds of a song I never wanted to end. Unlike anything I’d heard before. Especially not like the trash that frequents the radio. There were no lyrics; at least not ones I could discern. Just a mellifluous musical denouement. She was as infectious as the riffs of a pop song, but possessed all the class and composure of a classical composition. As intricate as a piece composed by Liszt himself, as haunting as Chopin’s twenty-one nocturnes, as sublime as Beethoven’s fifth. He was her favorite. She was mine.
Those twenty-two seconds have been resonating in my head from the moment we met. A song without words, yet one I found myself singing.
My eyes are open, but I’m still dreaming. And when it’s over, the only person I want beside me is her. Waking up to a face that pretty must be what heaven’s like.
