Alex
Everything was going great. And then she mentioned Scotland.
Sharon and I had spent the day in Hyde Park, and then we’d gone back to mine; she’d cooked some mezze for me, and we put music on, and it was all good . . . until she asked me when I planned to go home next.
The vision of a city with a volcano in the middle and a stony castle on top of it appeared in front of my eyes. And more: windy hills and moors and heavy skies and endless beaches – home.
And in a weird way, home was Inary.
The spell was broken. I was distracted for the rest of the night – I could see the worry in Sharon’s face, and I hated myself for causing her pain. Was I stringing her along, had Inary been stringing me along, both of us unwittingly? Was this some sort of misery dance, where each one of us was bound to one another in a set choreography, and each one of us was destined to get hurt?
It was just typical that after having spent the whole evening with Sharon, it had to be Inary who came to me in my dreams. I dreamt of an afternoon we’d spent in Regent’s Park, at the open-air theatre. I was still at the stage where I thought there could be something between us, before I realised how determined she was to keep our bond within the realms of friendship. Or within the realms of torture, depending on the point of view.
In my dream, every detail came back to me like it had happened yesterday. She was sitting beside me, reading the programme, an aqua-coloured cardigan folded on her lap and auburn tendrils wrapped around her ears like seaweed around a shell. She was wearing a short flowery dress in the tones of green, teal and blue, to bring out the startling, pure blue of her eyes. The setting sun shone on her hair, making it shimmer copper and gold. In my dream I could even smell her scent, sun cream and something flowery, like her dress. Her presence beside me – tenderness and excitement and the promise of soft skin – and the dreamy scenes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream melted together, and by the time it was finished I was in a dream too.
And then the dream turned strange. Inary touched my face and leaned in to kiss me – but in the fraction of a second before our lips met she began to vanish, like a vision. Like the fantasy she’d always been.
Beside me there was an empty plastic chair, the programme bent and muddy at my feet, and no sign of Inary.
She was gone.
This was our reality now, whether I liked it or not. Inary was away on the other side of the country, miles and miles away from me. We’d been blown apart – no, wait. We were never together.