Replies

I will take a bit of liberty and post a short story I wrote.
This is in fact based in reality, I did re-meet someone I knew twenty plus years ago, and did have the dream.

The New bed

A friend of mine told me about a dream he had a few days back.

Seems he had recently become re-aquainted with someone he had known many years before. He described her, and said he had been very fond of her, but I sensed it was quite a bit more, so I asked him about it.

In the dream, after all the years apart, they were living together, unmarried. Either they had just moved in, I'm not sure if it was a house or apartment, or there was something wrong with the bed they had, no matter, they had arranged to get a new bed.

Now I can't explain why we dream what we do, and my friend is sort of an oddball, but he said he was excited, because up to that time, they had been sleeping in the same bed, head-to-toe, one pillow at each end, and the new bed meant they could finally sleep like normal people.

The moving guys arrived, the old bed was taken down, and my friend and his lady decided to put the new bed against the east wall, so that the 5 AM early morning summer sun wouldn't wake them.

He tells what happens next:

"Late in the evening, after dinner, we finally went to bed. She had taken a bath, and the scent of her coconut shampoo filled the room, thick and heavy, it was delicious."
"She lay there to my right, with my arm around her, her head resting on my chest. She seemed uneasy, I sensed something in her, some kind of tenseness, or maybe reluctance, maybe she was unsure if we had done the right thing"

"I pulled her a little closer, then started talking, as softly as I could, for a minute or so at the most, about how I felt about her"
"She immediately relaxed, and a sense of peace came over her. I knew she was smiling. I bent down, kissed her on the top of her head, then I woke up, alone. My heart was pounding, my hands were shaking, I could still smell the coconut"

I looked over at my friend, he had a deep sadness to him. But I've seen him in a lot of circumstances, and he seemed to in some way be extremely happy about something. I couldn't decide if it was one or the other, then it hit me, it was both. He continued:

"And the saddest thing isn't the impossibility of the dream. When she heard what I said, she finally understood after all those years that my feelings didn't have anything to do with what was in me, nothing at all. My feelings were there because of what she had in her. She knows it would be impossible for me to walk or talk, or even take a breath, and not love her. It was a good thing. When she saw that, she surrendered, as totally and completely as I had surrendered to her all those years before. Whether it lasted a minute or an hour or a day or a lifetime didn't matter. It was a perfect moment"

"You're sounding pretty good there, maybe you should write some of this stuff down" I said.

"Neah, you're the writer type, not me. Words are usually a pretty poor substitute for real, true feelings. They're countefeit. Imitations. Don't measure up. But that night, in my dream they were right on the money."
"The saddest thing is that those words, those whispers full of life and love, laughter and lust are doomed to remain forever secret. Silently unspoken. And just like the smell of her hair, they're still in my head. Kinda a waste in some way"

He smiled.

"The hell with it, hey lets get a beer and shoot some pool..."

"OK", I said, and with that, my friends story of his dream ended. Just between you and me, if my pool game is on, he doesn't stand a chance. I didn't have the heart to tell him that nothing was probably ever gonna happen with his lady friend. But he's kinda like me, an honest guy, a little headstrung, but fair, and I know that even if his head could tell his heart not to have those feelings, he would never do it, because just like Shakespeare says, if our dreams don't exceed our grasp, what the hell's a heaven for, anyways?

POSTSCRIPT: I won six games, he won three, but I let him win two of em...

All Right Reserved