A Whole Life Lived in a Night

A whole life lived in a night. There’s a deeply embedded, residual pain within me due to what may very well be the sweetest image I have stored within me, a moment that lasted no time at all. My neurons’ random bursts of activity generated a woman I’ve fallen in love with, or more accurately, was already in love with, or, most accurately, a woman who gave rise to a feeling that I am in love with. Dreams are not linear, plot-driven stories. They’re made of fragments, moments, nearly all of which are forgot by the time you wake up and which you learn nothing from. One fragment had me lying on my bedroom floor with her, this beauty, knowing, without a doubt, all the things her and I have been through before. That feeling in a dream where every just makes sense with no questions asked. I come into the moment with all the prepackaged emotional baggage of my relationship with this person: the heartaches and passion and closeness and time spent too far apart. I have hop scotched those moments and entered into one where I am more in love and happy than can be told secondhand to strangers. I was experiencing the pinnacle of the best life has to offer. I may very well live the remainder of my life without seeing this girl in my dreams again. Even if I do, I can’t be guaranteed that same moment. It’s not the visualization I wish for, the girl I saw, but the feeling she brought out that I’ll long for every night. That was a moment never to be revisited in an identical capacity. I’m left to live with that feeling, a pain I called it, because it’s only human to wish that time to come alive and find you in your waking life. The idea of reliving that golden moment of perfection in your life, before you remind yourself that it was all a creation of bored brain cells at four in the morning. It’s a pain that I harbor with great sadness and equally great awe. Regardless of the reality, I experienced that feeling. I felt it wholly and genuinely when it was occurring, and lord was it grand. There was a sort of affection in that moment with her that goes beyond sensation to something deeper, a warm, nurturing pleasure in my soul or some area beyond nerve endings and the inner-workings of the human mind. It was everything our beating hearts strive for, and I had it. I had everything lying there in peace. I’m there. Her presence is heaven-sent happiness and I try to save it before I slip away, I need that moment with her. I need it to make it through my day,

maybe the week. When I awake, I need to believe that warmth could one day be real somehow, some way. She is a neuron’s flash turned false reality and for the briefest bit she was my ticket to feelings otherwise unknown: appreciation and affection, Zen and bliss and love godblessed. That moment is going to be lost; I’m being jerked back by consciousness’ ripcord; sensing this scene is too wonderful to be real. There is one chance to capture this sight beyond the bounds of this state and I take it. I photograph the sun streaming through the shades onto her face that is beaming bright at me, dark brunette strands falling onto my arm that gives her head rest; the moment and its emotions flash frozen for future review. I don’t even try to kiss her lips before the dream’s finish, not wanting to ruin the picture’s stillness. Silence defines my rise into waking life with sad eyes staring blankly and barely alive. She’s a long-gone adoration already, survived only in that mental photo as a memento of a second existence condensed into an image representing everythingabsolutely everything I wantthat I desperately need to find. I lay in memoriam of her, my mind’s spellbinding apparition, that random blip of electrical signals that morphed into a memory meant to represent desires unfulfilled, a closeness subconsciously sought, a life never lived.