Dream Depths

Six times a day, after 864 hours and 51,840 seconds later, my dream has begun haunting me yet again – a dream I seemed to dream all night long. I wondered why I keep coming back to this place – The Bridge. There isn’t the slightest practical reason for it anymore. So why? I sit on the wooden crumbling steps at the entrance of my dream home, and have no idea why my heart is in my mouth. Why am I full of envy when I see faces flash before me as if they were at home here? What is it, why do I envy them?

Recently, when the window was open on a hot day, I heard voices and the stuttering answers of anxious people to questions that made me tremble too. Sitting inside there once more – no, that was certainly not what I wanted. In the cool dark hour of the night then, I met a man with a protruding, birdlike head, advancing towards me with a suspicious look. “What are you searching for here?” he asked, when I passed him. He had an asthmatic falsetto that sounded as if it came from a court in the hereafter. I stood still, without turning around. “I lived here for 2 years”, I said and was filled with contempt for myself when I heard how hoarse it sounded. For a few seconds, a perfect eerie silence reigned in the room. Then the man shuffled off.

Time came to a halt and held its breath as it never again did. All the faces that I envied now began to layer up, blurring my imagination, my most-cherished dream and the sight of my own, as I finally got my answers. I discovered those were the faces of budding lovers living in my home, leaving no corner for the one who sketched this picturesque dream, and tinted it with striking pastel shades. The one who nurtured the first lilies and roses in the park. The one who sang her far-flung compositions to the cuckoos. The one who welcomed the wind with her open arms. And the one who was once accompanied by them all in mind and in form, but no more.

Today, I have come to the belief that every moment is the last. What could, should be done with all the time now before me, open and unshaped, feather-light in its freedom and lead-heavy in its uncertainty? Now, isn’t it illogical to be afraid of it knowing that I shall no longer experience this sudden extinction?