| He will hear a soft sound on his windowpane.
Tiny pebbles. and he rises from his bed and looks down to see his best friend
standing in the driveway. There he is, just like yesterday is today, just
as if all the years gone by have never passed. “I thought you died,” he’ll say later in the day as the two kick the soccer ball around in the driveway. His friend looks down and says, “I’m here now,” and nothing more. He nods at his best friend and says, “Yeah.” So they run through old parks they used to know and new ones he could swear his friend never went to with him, but somehow he seems to remember them anyway. They climb trees and fight with honeybees. They chase girls two years older than they are, and cross busy streets in sudden rush’s and fall onto the concrete on the other side laughing. Sipping soda on his front porch, his best friends says, “everything’s gonna be alright you know, between you and me. It wasn’t your fault.” He doesn’t know how to respond, and before he has to his friend chimes in again. “Let’s go to the hill, there’s an old dead tree, and abandoned fort.” He looks up, it’s almost sundown and he’s frozen for a moment in the shadows of that light. “One last game, and I have to get going.” He smiles a little and says, “My mother will be wondering where I am.” And they play that last game, burning the sun down to the last bronze-tinted embers and his friend fades slowly mid swing of a sword that is really a stick while the two defend the abandoned fort from the hordes of the enemy and he is left now to wonder without his friend can he hold the position? Or will the enemy overwhelm him? Then its over, and he’s surfacing, his eyes flutter open and the light flood ins and he’s awake. The world is as he remembered it. Everything is normal, a wan light creeping in through the blinds of his window. And he sits for a moment, his brain trying to orient itself, trying to form a bridge between the twin realities of conscious and subconscious mind, and failing. He lies there for a moment longer, the warmth of sleep and dream seeping from his body before whispering to himself, “it was so real… it was so real…” She came back a year later, and walked across the sand. |
