as if in a dream

12 march 2024

It was evening at the railway station when I saw her, as if in a dream.

Tired, disheveled, I make my way through the stream of people and run my hand through my hair. I lift my wrist with more effort than it should take and cast a weary glance at my watch. It is 7:10 p.m. and the sun is about to set, casting warm beams of golden light across the world.

I walk down the platform stairs, riding the wave of bodies that cram and jostle to be first out. It smells awful and the tunnels down here make it worse - gray, cracked concrete; harsh electric light that flickers now and again; the echo of footsteps compounding footsteps until they reach an inescapable cacophony like a ringing in my ears.

She’s standing at the intersection in the tunnel, on the left side where I normally go. Leaning against the wall, the people slip past her as though she isn’t there.

Inexplicably her face is lit in brilliant yellow, her shifting dark eyes made hazel in the light. She wears a brown knitted sweater and faded blue jeans with tears around the knees. Her backpack hangs loosely off of her right shoulder. 

In my light jacket and baggy hoodie; in my very skin, I suddenly feel inadequate. In her presence, I feel like my chest is about to burst. I am a wretched peasant witnessing a religious miracle and she is a saint, enrobed in a holy aura so that I myself feel naked, feel like I should rend myself to shreds there and then - 

And it feels almost like I shouldn’t look - it can’t possibly be her, here and now; and it’s rude to stare at a stranger; I glance at the floor and follow the rhythm of my footsteps; but I know she’s seen me and I look up and I can’t look away. 

She’s meters away, walking towards me in all her beautiful unreality. The crowds don’t even register in my mind anymore. It’s like we’re intangible and they’re just walking through us - or it’s the other way and there’s nothing else that exists in the world for the moment save her and I.

“Hi.”

God, it’s actually her. It’s unmistakably so. I thought the two of us might have grown apart - I thought I might have started to lose pieces of her in my memory, making way for Tuesday’s grocery lists and Sunday morning’s laundry. And I’m not sure how I feel that my body reacts to her voice; the hair raising on my arms; a deep breath that I can feel in my ribs, an acutely sharp pain in my chest; I fumble around for a cigarette but it would be a bad idea to smoke in a tunnel and either way I can’t find my pockets.

Like I’ve just seen a ghost.

In typical fashion I find myself unable to remember the very last time I saw her. But I know it was a time just like any other - a routine, regular meeting of two people, the significance assigned only after the fact. If I close my eyes, I can draw up composites of every minute we’ve spent together, the memories gradually reforming themselves on a canvas under the mind’s trained hand, from pencil sketches into fully rendered scenes where I can count our individual breaths.

We embrace. I rest my chin on her shoulder and stare into the distance. My eyes don’t register anything. For all I know we’re two characters in a play, the backup actors having cleared out after their scenes; a bright white spotlight shining down on us and I can smell her hair and it hasn’t changed one bit.

Pulling away, she kisses my cheek and I can feel it lingering like a burn mark. Has a friend just walked by from the right side and waved at us? No - there is nothing else that exists right now.

Does she even recognize me, hollow eyes on thinner frame? My hair is longer and the clothes I have on are a world away from what I used to wear. For all I know this is to her a diplomatic meeting. Brezhnev kisses Honecker on the Berlin Wall along the river Spree. My God, help me to survive this deadly love - when I went it was covered in chaotic graffiti and the contours had all but faded from their faces. Even their eyes had gone, leaving only the outlines of art that once was. She looks at me and I at her. Like the charismatic, democratically elected leader of a normal country, her counterpart’s face in profile is not familiar to her. The normalizing of relations came only after forty years of hostilities. But the agents of my despotic regime have placed spy cameras in every single corner of her office and I know her like I know the scars on my forearm.

My God, help me to survive this deadly love.

I don’t know where we go. When I come to we are on the eastbound night train, sitting side by side. Her head is on the window and mine is on her shoulder. The rest of the cabin is empty, and a foreboding quiet fills the air, pierced only by the rumble of the train as it glides over the railroad tracks.

She whispers to me, barely perceptible. “How are you doing?”

The implicit end of her sentence hangs low in the air, scalding and corroding like chlorine gas. “How are you doing since we parted?” Her tone is neutral, friendly, icebreaker at a party; to me it feels accusatory.

How am I doing? How have I done for myself? Grown out my hair, started eating better, picked up a smoking habit, started eating worse; bag of razors and bandages duct taped underneath the sink. Really I shouldn’t say ‘done for myself.’

To tell you the truth I wanted to be unrecognizable on the other shore. I wanted her to meet me again for the first time. To see my impeccable made-up facade in our little field of reeds, the stigmata on my hands wrapped tightly in gauze, mummification a rite befitting a god.

And in an afterlife I won’t have a hacking cough; and there won’t be sleepless nights of crying until I can’t and staring at figures passing me by in surgical scrubs, like robots in their surgical precision. In an afterlife we’ll have forever to kiss and make up and she’ll be reborn healthy and I’ll be born as I am.

Living for those three years, her afterimages all over my little room and her at the back of my mind like a tumor that’s just gone into remission, time and time again I thought I wouldn’t be able to take it anymore. An excuse - she would have wanted me to live - nothing more than an excuse. Baseless. Unjustifiable.

“I’ve been fine.” What else am I meant to say - what else can I say?

Now she breathes so lightly I wonder if I’m leaning against a couch cushion and I think back to when I stared at her electrocardiogram until my eyes hurt and my heart beat in time with hers. It’s disrespectful to speak too loudly in the presence of the dead.

Yet I find myself wanting to fill the silence with something. How old friends are faring. (silently) I’m sorry. A film I saw recently. (imperceptible) The empty hollow on the left side of my bed. For lunch, I had... (nothing at all) I love...

Her body is motionless as it was on a cold autumn morning and I turn my head to see what she sees. Outside the train it is pitch black and in our reflections it’s her eyes that are of this world and mine that are not. The cheap yellow lights flicker again as the train car rattles and I press my cold gray cheek into the bright golden nape of her neck.

Murmuring softly into her hair. “I missed you.”

She squeezes my hand tightly and I feel a flare of pain. Her hands are soft as silk; or like water. One night, we were out walking until the sun rose and we found ourselves by the lake, dazzling waves rippling on the surface. 

And I’m tired. I’m so tired. I’m exhausted and I lay my head flat against her lap. She puts her hand on my shoulder and I look up to see the shining morning sun, feel a light breeze against my skin and dew-stained grass underneath our legs.

She asks, “did you love me?” and her hair rustles like wheat in the wind. The lake is silent, as am I.

“I still do.”

She doesn’t talk and just strokes my arm and I know I’m a bad liar.

A love like the devotion of a guilty man before the altar, heaven beaming down on him through towering stained glass windows. Judas Iscariot kisses Jesus of Nazareth and it’s set in stone - it has to happen this way. The murderer kneels before the coffin and prostrates himself.

A love like an addiction. I light a cigarette, take a long drag, tear away the duct tape under the sink and put it out on my bare chest. But isn’t it worth something that I sat on the floor next to her bed when she was sick; that I cooked meals for her and made sure she ate; that I watched the IV drip slowly into her pale arm while I dug my fingernails into my skin and bit my tongue until I bled?

Obligation. A mother who has given the world a daughter gives her daughter the world. I think of my own mother - whiling her time away, alone, in an aging apartment where the walls sag and the stains from so long ago no longer wash out.

An incendiary, Romantic (not romantic) love like Whistler’s nocturne in black and gold, the falling rocket, spirited dashes of bright light that fade as soon as they appear. A love that leaves in its wake twisted steel and burning rubble and screams and sirens - all this, for just a moment, a spark, an instant, a fireball of myriad colours that draws in the eye and that you can’t look away from.

The train has come to a stop and we exit onto an isolated platform, surrounded by tall grass with no path in sight. The machinations of the setting sun dye the sky indigo and pink and orange, and wash the ground under our feet in molten bronze.

And I look up, scanning around until I find the sun, and I stare into it and back to her, into it and back to her, until my eyes sting and I’m seeing double, two of her, two more than I deserve. I think about the sun, and how its true brilliance only shows when it’s about to fade away - a light that goes from bright white to gold to bronze to orange, red, black, the colors of a dying star that practices dying each day at around 7:10 p.m. 

And I ask her, “do you still love me?” while the words in my mind are “did you ever?” 

Her mouth is still, her red lips don’t move, she stands tall in the setting sun with her perfect proportions like a Roman statue and I know what this is.

“I just want to start over again with you...” And silence.

I think that long before someone dies, they decide to. Once someone has decided to die, there’s nothing you can do for them. I don’t think the decision is a conscious one. I think that she, to her very last, fought to live and breathe and see. I think I want to live. I think...

They go to class and go to work and run errands as usual, putting on their best makeup and wearing their favorite sweaters. Dead men walking. I think about the sun, and how its true brilliance only shows when it’s about to fade away. We are motionless - a tableau, I watching her, Lot’s wife looks back and is transformed into a pillar of salt. A slow wind seeps through the field of reeds.

In my vain hopes - for next lives, for afterlives - I realize I have no idea what happens after death. There is no practice good enough for it. A spark, an instant, a conflagration - and yet the mounds of kindling, of torn letters and magazine clippings, were placed years in advance. It’s set in stone - it has to happen this way. The killed remain dead and the living can only mourn - it’s just how it is. The final act comes to a close.

The sun is rapidly disappearing over the horizon. In my mind, I know; I know exactly what this is; I know that we can never start over and that we will never start over. In the darkening twilight, she appears transparent, like the wind could go straight through her... 

As if in a dream.