Dream #7 - Rude Awakenings

     Some friends of mine had recently married and moved into a new place. I may have encouraged them to buy that particular house for reasons of my own. It was in a row of squat brown brick townhouses. I’d gone to stay with them for three days to help them settle in though I did little enough of that. Instead I wandered the lawns of the area, sitting in the grass and under the trees, away from anyone or anything else. I generally made myself visible in the hopes that she would see me and seek me out. I knew in which of the townhouses she lived but I dared not approach for fear of her husband answering the door. Besides, it wasn’t exactly like she wanted to see me. I was engaged in what might be described as some kind of reverse stalking.

      I saw her from time to time in her daily routine, crossing the street to go to the store or getting into her car. She may have seen me once or twice but probably wasn’t sure it was me. Once she stopped for two seconds to watch me though I called no attention to myself beyond a smile in her direction. She didn’t respond and instead ducked into her dark green Toyota and drove away.

      By the third day I had enlisted the help of the friend who had moved in there. I stood in the archway between two houses, hidden behind some large cubic moving boxes – the kind you only ever see on TV, never in real life – on the street perpendicular to the row of houses she lived in. My friend stood on the other side of the boxes in the open and waited. When he saw her emerge from the sunken garage and head for the car he waved her over. A split second later the kid came running out behind her and her husband followed. She turned to the husband and said something along the lines of “I’m going to pop over and say hi to the new neighbours.” A half truth and a dangerous one. If he had been a social person, he might have joined her. Luckily he did not and sat in the car watching the kid play on the lawn.

     She approached my position, the look on her face not changing even a hint as she saw me hiding among the boxes. I poked my head up as she arrived. She leaned over the boxes, hands behind her back and sweetly but emotionlessly leaned over to give me a peck on the nose. She turned her back to face the other way, ostensibly being sociable to my friend but asking me what I was doing here. I replied that my friend had just moved in here entirely by coincidence. I neglected to mention that I helped make the decision. “We’ll talk later,” she said. I replied that I was leaving tomorrow. “The mall,” she instructed and walked off.

     I found myself at the mall, a large square affair. I figured I would just wander until I encountered her again. I found in front of me a series of footprints marked out in blue and green paint like an elaborate game of hopscotch. I began to follow in the footsteps as they climbed up over a pile of boxes and onto a pair of large blue cylinders. I stood at the top looking out at the crowd that was watching me before jumping down into a pair of footprints on the floor below me and what seemed like an awfully lot further than the cylinders had been high. I landed in a deep crouch and rose to finish like gymnast, hands in the air, feet together. The crowd gave me an ovation. The footprints carried on, blue and green  on the black tile floor winding through the wide hallway of the mall and into a toy store where a group of children were sitting at a play-table eating white cake and fudge. I attempted to stop and join them. Though I don’t care for children, I do like fudge. But someone urged me on, not allowing me to stop. “Why can’t I stop?” I asked. “It’s for the children,” the woman responded. I was slightly miffed. What entitles children to the sweet things in life and not me?

      The footprints led off to a section of the mall where the hallway narrowed around a cornered store. I stopped and waited under a soaring palm tree in a marble planter that reached for the skylight overhead. I stood, back to the tree, waiting. Her face materialized out of the throng and consumers, they seeming to make way for her like Moses parting the Red Sea. I don’t know whether the lights overhead shone down on her like the rays of God or whether I was just imagining it. She was just as beautiful as I remembered her from years before. Her dirty blonde hair hung shoulder length tucked behind her ears with a little bunch hanging in front of it. Her brown eyes glowed at me, taking a golden hue. A hint of a smile crooked the corners of her mouth though it didn’t show in her eyes. She might have been suppressing joy at seeing me or a grimace for the same reason. She was hard to read sometimes. Over the intervening years I had tried to conjure her in my mind, to see that beautiful face again. It had always been a little blurry. The features just a hint off. Now here she was in full high resolution glory. My heart swelled with a surge of pride though I had no reason for such feelings. She stopped in front of me, rubbing her palms on the thighs of her jeans. “We only have a few minutes. I don’t know where they are but I don’t want to run into them with you here.” By “them” she meant her husband and son. She was nervous but not just about being caught. Nervous because she didn’t have to do this. Nervous because she could have just ignored me and carried on with her happy life. But maybe this decision to talk to me suggested it wasn’t so happy.

     We walked toward a side aisle where there were no stores, a close hallway of white stone turned to white painted cinderblocks, here and there dotted by the red glow of exit signs and steel doors with reinforced windows. “I am happy to see you. But... first of all, you can’t be here. You know you can’t. Move on. When I first saw you again, it brought back all the things you did to me. To us. Even to the dog.”

      I felt ashamed and hung my head in sorrow of things past and lost and intangible things sifting through clenched fingers. My eyebrow arched as I tried to remember what I had done to the dog, I couldn’t even remember even seeing it. Behind me Toby (my parent’s beagle – and this is odd that it was Toby and Lily) slunk along the wall of the corridor, tail between his legs, big brown baby beagle eyes glancing up between me and her, evidently afraid of her. I caught her by the wrist and turned her to look at the dog who had snuck into one of the open doors and had raised a leg against the corner of someone’s desk. “Apparently I’m not the only one to have done something to the dog,” I said with a touch of bitter irony. My eyebrows wrinkled again as I tried to recall what I had done to her. Everything I had done, I had done for her. It was she who broke my heart. Before I could tell her this, she began to dematerialize and was lost again forever.