It was an ordinary summer's night when subtropical heat was overabundant and calmness insufficient. When morning came there was nothing she could do to shake off the dreams she had overnight. Some dreams slipped away, some didn't. And these were the ones that remained.
Whether she had dreamed of him or it was actually he who had sleepwalked into her subconsciousness she did not know. It troubled her all the same because she was a dreamer who knew too well that dreams were a dangerous signal, in extreme circumstances an irrevocable prophecy. They foresaw things that were invisible.
She had three dreams.
In the first one he kissed her.
The second one came along not as a sequel but a distracted stream of time that wiped itself out. The second dream was so unimportant that the instant it came into being it was consumed by absolute forgetfulness.
Her conscious self from the first dream was well-preserved in the third one. It was as if she had survived the distance of a lifetime and had eventually retrieved her lost self. But it was not enough. It was a lost dream that she had to retrieve, a dream in which they both existed.
It was wonderful how a dream could allow a setting, a consciousness, and above all a feeling with such complexity. She was sleeping, her mind at rest, but in fact she was adrift in a realm of unbridled mental wilderness (if not madness) which rendered everything restless (if not reckless).
She kept walking and walking around the neighbourhood to look for him. The streets were steep and narrow and the buildings looked like blocks of torn paper with stains that stayed forever. She didn't recognise the place but somehow she understood it was the east side of the island. On her left hand side she saw the harbour that separated thousands of lovers.
And there he was.
