He was just wandering through the city today. There was nothing he had to do for anyone, nothing on his mind, his headphones on he went out the door and started walking towards the bus stop. The same voice he’d heard all month starts singing to him again. The guy is talking about parties and beaches and dancing to the tom-toms, it sounds like a waltz. He met a girl there but she was married, so… Is this year better than the last one? He gets on the first bus that comes along, pushed by the echoing guitar that tells him it’s OK to loiter. He finds a free seat by the window and looks at the sky. He hears the guy singing about the decades flying by. “I’ve been doing this for awhile”, he whispers to himself. The sky looks cloudy but it’s better that way. “It’s gonna be a good year. Out of the darkness and into the fire”
So there’s a bit of a storm coming along. “Well, doesn’t matter”, he thinks to himself. “I’m going away to the islands tomorrow; maybe I won’t even come back for awhile. Would seven years be enough for a holiday?” He reaches for his inside pocket and takes out a bottle. He takes a sip of the hard stuff, and soon enough things start moving faster, and everything’s spinning a bit. “Maybe I’ll send her a postcard: <<I keep seeing you in the stars, the half-moon and the setting sun>>. That sounds kinda lame though. I should get off this fucking bus.”
The sun is setting by now. The sky is red, and he hears a song called “Red Moon”. The wind is getting rough, he can feel some raindrops on the back of his hand. The piano, the gentle strumming, then the Mexicans playing their trumpets and horns. The chorus ends on a major chord, but we need to go through a minor to reach the verse. The wind is blowing dust in his eyes, but the waltz keeps playing calmly and everything looks beautiful. Tomorrow morning, there’s hope that she’ll be home, by his side. He remembers how they’d go out dancing to this place she knew, and the band would always be playing some song they both loved. He takes another sip of the hard stuff to drive the memory away. “It’s just that I still call you mine, I’m still hanging on”.
By now there’s no one left in the streets, the thunder and lightning drove everyone away, the sky is black and blue. He finds himself in a familiar neighborhood, it’s the one where his friend Sophia lives. He knocks at her door and later on, things get hectic. She’s always a good friend, but he can’t see her face through the cigar smoke.
Well, he wakes up about two hours after midnight, feeling like shit. “Bad luck, you’ve come for me. What am I doing here, I don’t need this”. Now he’s leaving in the middle of the night, just as he came in the evening, everything just the way it was found. He grabs a cab to the airport, wondering what happened to him as he replays through the days that have brought him here. All he wants to do now is wander down an open road and keep going.
* * *
Now he’s on a plane, he’s flying higher, back on his own, towards a new country. Well this is it. Things are looking up now. He’ll just go see the world. When was it that he fell asleep exactly? And when did he start dreaming all of this? “If she would just throw me a line, I’d probably jump at it. Why does it feel like the world is ending“. The trumpet and the trombone are still echoing in the hall, but he’s waited long enough. It feels like I’m gonna wake up soon. It’s just that dreaming is all a man can do. You know how you sometimes have those dreams, especially when you’re young, where you’re so perfectly happy that you wish you’d have never woken up?
– stiev
9/10
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The Laminated Book of Dreams 