The Valentine Dream

 

I remember it was the third consecutive Valentine's Day I spent alone. I remember just a week before; I was with a girl I met uptown a month earlier. She was...she was attractive, yes. I would be lying if I said she wasn't. And I was all right with this, for the time being.

 

After our sub-par "romance" concluded, she felt the need to slink in closer to me on my bed in an attempt to cuddle, as girls often do. I allowed her to only because I was able to pretend that she was, well someone else let's say. It was easy to pretend because she also had blond hair. Whether my conscience had told me that this was right, I don't recall. But something still did not feel right. She smelled... strange. Not bad (She had a scent of maybe coconut, maybe vanilla, or maybe both) but it wasn't right. I was also not comfortable. She didn't seem to fit in the crook of my arm as it stretched out and around her. I felt as if I was cradling her body from a fierce wind and not of gentle courtship. I don't know if it was the bed, or the brand new covers that I had bought the night before or the fact that I was not used to more than enough pillows for one person. The bed was suffocated with pillows. I was restless for hours before I fell asleep.

 

And when I did succumb, I had strange vivid dreams...I did. I awoke in a beautiful basking sunlight. It was pleasant, warm. It made me smile as I turned my face to its rays. Strangely, my bed was sitting in the sand of a pure white beach. The ocean tide was a clear blue, like the color of the sky before the sunrise. I looked to the opposite side of my bed and found it vacant. Although I knew that someone had been there because the pillow was sunken and the covers were tasseled. Not to mention that I saw a set of imprints in the sand that was leading away from the beach and my bed. The tide was just about to reach these footprints and wash them away forever. But I followed them before they had vanished.

 

The footprints led me away from the crystal blue tide and the fine white sand and toward the forest well beyond the crashing waves. The sound of the surf began to dissipate. Shadows of the giant leaves of the palm trees blotted my path and a myriad of branches of the yellow birch cast thin lines of darkness as I walked deeper into this woodland.

 

I hadn't once thought of why I was walking so very far. It was as if I were part of the gentle trade wind that blew the air through the plantlife and over the leaves of the trees, making them shutter with relaxing sways.

 

Every step, deeper into this vast wilderness just beyond the sight of the picturesque beach in which the tide would have by now surely smothered and swallowed up the two sets of footprints left behind.

 

There was a hut ahead made of palm branches and kindling shimmering with reflections of broken sunlight. It stood solitary near the site of the collapse of a great oak in which only its stump had remained. The shards of the stump had been silked over smooth enough to make a sort of "nature-seat" in the forest just outside of the hut's doorway. And so I sat on its smooth surface where the trees rings circled inside the stump and were as sharp as the sky.

 

By now the ocean was a distant memory. But how did I get here? A wind tickled my hair and my eyes closed with comfort. Then there was a pleasant fragrance amidst. A hand reached out to me and gracefully touched my shoulder causing me to turn around. I knew who it was- but I did not believe it, not just yet.

 

Just as evenly as I entered this dream, so abruptly it ended. I awoke and sat up in my bed which was now empty, save for my lonely soul. The note that was left on the pillow read "I'm sure that good times were had by all." And then I stared into the vacancy that lay next to me. I smiled. I was happy because I knew that the woman that had lied in my bed the previous eve was not the woman that was in my dreams, no. However, the woman that was in my dreams is no longer in the hut. This would plague my dreams for nearly two years. I would have to travel great distances to see her again, both in miles and in time.

 

It wasn't until one night, in the same dream I walked not to the hut, but back to my bed that sat solitary on the white impeccable beach. Every night I had dreamt of that beach. I knew that I could go wherever I wanted to. So I did. For the first time since I awoke on that beach in a dream, I headed back to where I had started this long and fortuitous journey. I could see that there was someone lying in my bed. She had beautiful locks of blond hair that cascaded over the humps of pillows and reflected off of the high sun. The tide was ebbing at a perfect length and left bubbles of white foam as it retreated. I made my way to my side, which was no more a lonely bed. I knew that this had no longer been a dream. This had not been a dream because when I awoke in the morning, it was you under the covers with the head of beautiful blond hair that shone with the morning sun. And you reached your hand to my shoulder and pulled me into your arms. And we fit, just right. And as I hold you again this morning the dream of the beach now break with the perfect waves just outside our bedroom window. And with that, I will say: I love you, forever and always. And then I thought, maybe I was still dreaming.

Reviews

[Dot]

This is a wonderfully moving and romantic story. I hope you find your "real love" and be happy.