dreams

I've had this fantasy for as long as I've had fantasies, although over the years the characters have changed. As usual, I feel a little nervous about sharing. Will she know herself, and know me, if she reads this?

This is a story from my published collection, White Fire and Other Tales. Please order a copy and support my work! Also available at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

I feel the eiderdown touch of her sleeping breath on my lips; and I hesitate.

Coming here suddenly seems absurd. Even though I reasoned it out, over and over, until nothing else made sense. Even though I rehearsed this moment a thousand times. Even though I fought despair and madness, and faced the terror of crossing the city, just to be here, now.

To steal a single kiss.

I have never been this close to her before. I can see the movement of the tiny, pale hairs upon her cheeks, their tips flung back by my own trembling breath. I can see the roughness of her foundation, the cracks where it has shrunk. I can see the terrible dryness of her skin beneath; and a sob escapes me, rushing over the miniature world of her face like a gust of a hurricane.

I grit my teeth to hold in the pain, the turmoil of loneliness, of grief, of love. I tell myself this moment will not be spoiled: even for its own sake. Whether or not my kiss, could wake her.

I study her, in the silence. My lips even twist into a rictus grin as I realise, she is not so classically pretty as the image of her that I hold in my head. Her features are not princess-perfect, beyond the first glance. Her bones are too prominent, her skin too tight. Her nose is not even straight.

But the reality of her makes such discoveries insignificant. She lies before me, almost peaceful as her body loses its slow fight with dehydration. The end caught her in a moment of relaxation, although the book that lies awkwardly on the floor, its pages ruffled beneath it, suggests she had not yet deliberately committed herself to sleep. The sleep that so many others had so naively allowed, including myself.

The only difference was, I woke up in the morning.

I did not even realise I was alone, until I left the flat. I could perhaps have paid more attention to the silence, or to the hint of smoke in the air, or to the apparently determined slumber of my girlfriend. But it was the emptiness of the street that finally got through to me.

The first thing I did, absurdly, was check the time on my phone; as though it had some power to contradict the sun that soared overhead. But then, quite suddenly, all the morning's oddities came together in my mind, and distended into a suffocating mass of dread.

There was a car, crashed apathetically into its parked fellows. Its still-running engine was the only sound in the whole street. It gave me something to focus on, and I rushed to see if anyone was hurt.

The driver was unconscious, of course, slumped behind the limp ejection of the airbag. I spoke to him, my words clipped and awkward, my tone rising, my body tense as I held myself back from touching him; although the quiet of the street numbed me before I began to shout. I could feel panic threatening. I plucked out my phone again, and dialled for the police. It rang, but no-one answered.

I fled back into the building. At some point on the stairs I started cursing; then I was shouting, before I had even opened the door to our flat. I burst into the bedroom; stopped as horror clamped down on me; and then I was shaking her. Shaking her, more and more violently, as reason fled.

Sometime later, I tried a few more numbers. Later again, I looked out of the window, and saw the smoke rising over the buildings. I even found the courage to leave the flat and knock on the doors on the same floor. But I could not stay out for long; terror of something nameless drove me back behind lock and bolt.

I don't know if it was hours or days later that the idea came to me, to kiss her. I think the indulgence of it even made me smile, as I sat huddled on the floor, unable to act, in terror of not acting.

And, immediately, I knew it would not work. Somehow the delusions of my comfortable relationship could not withstand the force of this extremity. I knew I could not wake her with a kiss; because only true love's kiss could wake her.

And so here I am, my tears falling onto the skin of another, that I know, deeply, I do love. I don't know if that love will be enough. I am scared to try, scared to know if this last hope is vain. Scared, even though all morality is meaningless now, to kiss her without her permission.

But oh, I have kissed her before, in my mind. So many times. Kissed her, and held her slight body, and felt it pressing against me. Mostly that has been enough; and her image has been spared the indignity of a fully-blown fantasy, or of taking control of my own fingers to shamefully consummate my unrequited love in the dead of night. And yet now I feel shame, as my eyes slide from the crystal presence of her face to the ephemeral shape that lies beneath the covers on the bed, and my loins and my cheeks flush crassly at the reality beneath.

I am whimpering with the force of my need. I never told her of my love, in life. Now I am here, as death stands waiting, and I cannot make myself take this one impossible chance which I have deluded myself into attempting. I cannot bear to know that I will never be able to tell her. To be with her. To love her with my heart, and with my body.

I lift a stray hair from the angle of her cheek, laying it back over her ear. My fingertip just touches the soft warmth of her earlobe, and lingers unbidden. I want to let my palm fall, to cup her neck and jaw, but I cannot take the step. Instead I simply focus on that single, tiny point of contact, and I feel its pin-sharp power begin to push aside my fright, my doubt, my weakness.

The tipping point happens without realisation, without thought. Her lips, my lips, are a softly wondrous unity, lifting me. There is only this moment. No sleep, no waking; no death, no life; no reality, no fantasy.

I am with her, at last. Let dreams follow as they will.