I : should you choose to stay

I peeked through the door hinges, curious fingers slipping through gaps for better grip. The woman was beautiful and young, yet her youth looked weary; and her time looked past. His face was grave and solemn, yet very beautiful also, in the way that tombstones stand elegant in quiet cemeteries. They were both proud people— very guarded, and the man looked sorry. In fact, I think perhaps he had never looked more sorry in his life.

"I think I ought to apologise," he said. And the woman slapped him viciously, simmering rage boiling to the surface. The man looked ready to lose his temper as well, but something stopped him. I think, and I know, my nightgown slipping down by skinny shoulders, that it was guilt.

"I deserved it," he admitted. The woman said nothing, her dark skin and dark eyes glimmering like black crystals in the light. There was nothing to say. She had already forgiven him.

I think, perhaps, that was what love was.

Later, when I left, the both of them still talking, I would wander the corridors and hallways of this palace. It was ever-changing. Whenever I looked behind, I would find the path that trailed behind me significantly different from the path that I had taken in the first place. Maybe, I thought distantly, this was because you can only experience the path not taken, in dreams. The trail you gave a miss because you were too scared to know, the phone call you never answered, the date you missed, the yes to the question you answered no to.

I think she would have made a great Dream queen, I thought to myself idly. On my left, a man boiled his brother alive while a gargoyle watched. He squealed like a pig as the scalding water shot up his bones and melted his skin. He clawed at the cauldron and his nails fell by my feet. I picked them up and handed them over to the gargoyle, who nodded to me in gratitude.

I also think she made the right choice.

When I wandered a bit, past my teacher in her honey bee suit, I saw the mailman making love to the dog, my father chopping his arm in ten places then twenty places more; and then I went to the garden. Bamboo shot out of the ground as orchids wove their way around my feet. Lanterns swung to a non-existent music while a monster, a yokai I think, lazed in the background. It was very pretty. It seemed like a lovely oriental garden at first, but when I went closer, it encompassed the whole sea.

I think Moses died here.

I walked to the sand, the grains rising up and catching in the web between my toes. What a big sea, I thought. I must be dreaming. I sat down, fiddling absently with the loose threads of my nightgown. Sometimes, I wished they would catch around my neck and slice my throat open.

"Would you have liked her to say yes?" I asked him. He sat next to me, quiet and distant. I wasn't here. I was the rock on the edge of the world, and he was the traveller that owned the cosmos, clad in black casual. The Dream King pays no heed to the dreamer; they are visitors and owners of his world and so he watches over us.

"Yes," he answered me. He sounded tired. "Yes, I would have. Very much."

"I'm sorry."

"It is her choice. I must come to respect it as I should have so many aeons ago."

I nodded along, not really listening. The sea rushed up on my stone feet, carved streamlets between my stone fingers and wore down on my skin. The breeze blew, tasting of oranges and salt. Seagulls whistled. I was still dreaming. I smiled.

"Would you have liked her to say yes?"

He said nothing, pushing castles out of sand between his feet, poking holes. Soldiers hung precariously from tethered ropes above the air, realising that their fortress was not ground-bound. They yelled. Their enemies' invasion would not be successful, but if they could not leave and reach the ground, how could they get their supplies? They were going to starve. I saw a soldier weep at the realisation. He jumped and his creator merely scooped him from the ground and made his bones a part of the foundation.

"I don't know."

Ah it's true. It's true because as much as you can love someone, as willing as you are to die for them, you don't know what's going to happen afterwards. And you'll never know.

"Maybe she could have been your queen. Maybe you would have had another son, or a daughter. Maybe you wouldn't have tired of her in forever."

"Maybe."

You frowned at him. You looked at his grainy castle, and you reached over and fashioned a tall, glacial tower. The princess peaked out from her cage and shivered, the frost stabbing into her lungs.

"You need a dragon," you suggested, and so he made one. The dragon was successful. It ate a suitor.

Something nudged at your consciousness, and so you looked up. The sun was now sinking, launched by the circus canon over the moon and into the sea. You watched it drop past the ocean waves, like an angler fish's light glimmering in the deep. Well,you thought, you were in the Dreaming. Everything that had happened, could have happened, would have happen and would never happen was here. So—

"Maybe you can dream about it."

"I can't dream."

"Well," you said, not missing a beat. "If that's the case—" You stood up, brushing off sand grains and sea glass. It was time for you to wake up.

"Then you can move on."

And then you woke.

In the morning, you would slam the alarm shut and rush to the bathroom to prepare for school. You had a dream. You couldn't remember what it was.

And so the day went.