# Dream The night wrapped around me like a familiar cloth, worn soft at the edges. I lay in bed, listening to the sound of the city breathing beyond the window—a distant hum that was neither quite awake nor quite asleep, the way a city breathes at three in the morning. Then, without warning or passage, I was elsewhere. Not somewhere I recognized, yet everything felt known to my bones. It was a place the body remembers even when the mind cannot. A street lined with trees whose leaves glowed faintly phosphorescent in a darkness that wasn't quite dark. The sky above held no moon, no stars, yet there was light—diffuse, shadowless, as if the air itself had learned to glow. I walked, though I had no destination. My feet knew the path. Around me, houses stood with their windows dark except for one—a single window glowing amber, warm as honey. I wanted to reach it, but the street lengthened with each step, the window receding like a thought I couldn't quite grasp. Then she was there. Not suddenly. Rather, as if she had always been there and I was only now remembering her presence. She wore a blue dress, the color of water at evening, and her face held that peculiar quality of dream-faces—familiar and strange simultaneously, as if she were someone I'd loved in another life. "You're late," she said, smiling. I wanted to ask late for what, but my tongue felt thick with sleep. Instead, I reached out to touch her hand, and she let me, her fingers cool and real. "I've been waiting," she continued, looking past me at the glowing window. "But I can't wait much longer." "Wait for what?" I finally managed. She turned to me then, and her eyes held something I couldn't name—sorrow, perhaps, or pity, or recognition. "For you to wake up." The words hung in the phosphorescent air like suspended rain. I tried to hold onto her, but she was already dissolving, becoming translucent, becoming the air itself. The street began to fold. The glowing window fractured into fragments of light. "Don't go," I said. "I'm not going anywhere," her voice came, already distant. "You are." And then— I opened my eyes to my own ceiling, the familiar cracks in the plaster, the pale pre-dawn light seeping around the curtains. My heart was racing. The city hummed beyond the window, still breathing its three-in-the-morning breath. I lay there for a long time, trying to hold the dream in my mind the way you hold water in your hands. But it was slipping away already, leaving only a trace—the color blue, the feeling of a cool hand in mine, and the unbearable certainty that I had forgotten something important, something I was supposed to remember. I never did remember. But sometimes, in that hour before dawn when the city is neither quite awake nor quite asleep, I find myself back on that street, searching for that amber window. And I think I hear her voice, patient and infinitely sad, asking me again: *Where have you been?*

We deserve, after so many tragedies, a story. Let's not forget that I tell love stories and I like to write them. Sometimes I live them intensely with my characters, and I really don't know what reality is—what I've been through, what I've wanted to live, or what I've simply invented.

That summer I was alone for a long time. Too long. I avoid vacations with couples; I bear my solitude well because I've known for years now that no situation is perfect—everything has its gains and its losses. My solitude had three hundred and fifty days of advantages and fifteen of disadvantages. Holidays surrounded by friends, all of them coupled, all kind and attentive, but inevitably together. It's not envy, as Pradeep once told me. It's more an amalgam of unfulfillment, sadness, even anger, and a vast, aching desire. The desire to feel love that, on holiday, becomes almost unbearable.

That's what I was thinking the night I left—around three o'clock on a ferry between islands. Most passengers had drifted into sleep somewhere on the upper deck, sprawled in comfortable armchairs like beds, lulled by a gentle breeze. But I cannot sleep while travelling—not on trains, not on planes, and least of all on boats. Though, unlike a plane, a boat—a boat I love. I crave something visceral about intense experiences: waves striking the hull, that sensation of gliding, the way it echoes some memory of happiness. I was leaning against the rail, watching the waves, hearing them too. And somewhere at the edge of the sea, day was beginning to break.

I don't think I noticed him immediately. But then I was following a wave with my eyes, and he was there. Not far, but not close enough to see him clearly either. For a long time he was only a silhouette, yet I became so aware of his presence that I couldn't concentrate on the sea, the sunrise, the waves. Like something flowing and inevitable, the whole landscape gathered itself into his shape, and I felt with absolute certainty that this—this feeling—was not mine alone. I had the sense that the waves, the ones we were riding, were passing through us both, and we were both catching them, releasing them in the same way. Something shrouded us—a mystery we had never known before. We waited for the light to come, and when it did, everything became clear. We hadn't spoken a word, but we looked at each other as if we'd always known. That liquid gaze that stirs your solar plexus, turning sensation into desire. We knew each other without ever having seen each other. We remembered each other without a past.

Of course, this doesn’t happen in ordinary life, but we were on a sea, at sunrise, alone on a ship crowded with people, surrounded by all manner of siren songs—not rising from the waters, but from the two of us, calling to each other, wrapping ourselves in melodies unheard yet so potent we nearly trembled in their cadence. I don’t think we spoke for a long time, at least not in words. Then we began to speak, but I remember nothing of what we said. He’d drawn near to me, our shoulders had touched, and when we looked at each other our faces were twenty centimetres apart. We could see the wonder in his eyes, and he could certainly see it in mine. Was it love? Attraction? A fleeting encounter? All of these at once, yet also something more—the sense that we fit together like two pieces perfectly joined. We felt it almost physically, this union, not as something carnal or ethereal, but as a material truth. The physics of our joining was intoxicating, telling us that if we drew close enough, we would become one.

The wind grew stronger, and it seemed to echo what was passing between us—the sweetness of that first moment swept away by a violent hunger to be together. For a time I thought we simply wanted to make love, but it was far more than that. We wanted to be together, to end this breaking apart, an absurd desire for someone so unknown yet so natural to us after all we’d lived through. We were approaching a port, and I knew a choice had to be made. I thought I would abandon everything if he spoke a single word. I would have gone ashore and vanished forever with him if he’d asked. Someone would have called down from the deck—he’s just a friend—but I would have said nothing.

He looked at me with intensity, with desperation, then went down to shore first. Alone. He never looked back. Then he disappeared unseen into the fog on the beach. I felt devastated as the storm continued on the ship; it was merely a stop; we were bound for another port. My holiday ended there. All the joy had gone—a dry riverbed, that’s what I was left with.

For months his eyes haunted me. Sometimes upon waking I had the impression he was beside me, looking at me with the same regret I carried with me, the regret of what we’d surrendered. How do you know you made the wrong choice? You simply know. Sometimes you must listen to what the sea or the night or the sand whisper—trust their voices, for they know far more than we ever will.

I fervently wish life were precisely like that magical dream.