Songs of Fantasy, Songs of Reality

There is a sharpness to the dark air outside the doors. Air flows in thin rolling clouds from my mouth as I stand pulling my jacket around me and the metallic sound of heels on the platform behind me make me turn to see her. She is smiling goodbye to the bouncers.

There was snow, but in the dream I only knew that there was snow. All I could see of it was the brightness and visceral sharpness of the lines of her face from a whiteness that in truth I could not see around me. She was looking at me while sitting in some sort of sled or carriage made of curved and ornate blue steel, drawn by a grey and noisy horse. She was wearing a coat of grey furs. Her hair was dark and hung down around her face as a gently flowing frame to her beauty. A note of joy and spinning need thrust upwards to the top of my chest and I walked towards her.

We stop on the pavement at the bottom of the steps and kiss again, swayingly. One of the bouncers whistles and the other laughs. She turns her head away from mine, grinning towards them and waving as we walk away. We stop again quickly, hungrily kissing as though we are looking for something in each other.
“Come on,” she says, and grabs my hand.
I follow where she leads.

She smiled as I walked towards her across the forest clearing. Her smile encouraged me and made me glad, made my soul shout and dance for her closeness. One more step on invisible snow and her face cleared, another and it dropped. Her face became sad and scared. She was so beautiful and I felt the need to be near her singing within me. She began to speak but I didn’t hear her voice. In the dream only the sight of her was real, but like I knew that there was snow, the meaning of her words became my knowledge.

The light of the street lamps is a rusty orange, the colour of clay water. It is a dry night in the middle of a week in December and the town is silent. It is past eleven o’clock. A quick sidestep and another fumbled and yawning kiss in the lee of a wall and the light is almost gone. It is more distant, in the bulbs through the slowly moving branches of the trees around the edge of the park. A path winds off to the right and we go left, keeping close to the wall. It is cold. I sit down roughly at the base of a tree and she smiles down at me and undoes the top tin poppers of her smooth white dress.

I was not allowed to kiss her. I knew that if I kissed her then she would die. I looked into her eyes as she began to cry and knew that she wanted to kiss me as well, that this was a love that would have to stay, crystal and still, at a distance. I put a hand on the metal of the carriage. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. Her eyes were blue, the kind of blue that hovers at the top of the dome of the sky on a hot day, but her skin was like the snow. And she was crying.

We start talking at almost the same time. I can’t believe that it is happening, and say so. She grins and moves. Her breasts are out of her dress and in my hands and I still can’t believe it and say so.
“Have you done anything like this before?” I ask.
“Loads of times,” she says. “Haven’t you?”
“No,” I reply.
It is very cold and the air is a sharpness on my face and my hands, but there is such heat and warmth between us.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” I say, wishing instantly that I hadn’t said anything.
She moves a couple more times and then it is over.

The ache inside of me rose and choked the feeling of joy and happiness at her presence. All that mattered, all of a sudden, was that moment of touch, that moment of experiencing her and her taste, her touch, her scent. There was nothing else in all of my mind. It rose and rose and I reached out and touched her face and she shed a tear but did not move away. I straightened up and climbed into the carriage and sat down facing her. This close I could feel the ache in her, too. I leant closer to her, and she took a sharp and quick breath but did not move away. She tilted her face - towards me, not away, and I moved smoothly forwards and kissed her mouth.

We stand up, together, and she does up her dress. It is very cold. We don’t speak until we are walking on tarmac again, around the corner from the club. We kiss a couple of times, more softly. Just as we are about to begin climbing the steps I realise, in a slow but fascinating dawning, that I do not know her second name. Her costume has a badge on it and she turns it smilingly to me when I ask her. When we get inside the club we turn away from each other and walk across the carpet in different directions.

All was spinning and glowing, all was heat and heart and love and life and the feel of her being on my lips and the rising joy in my chest again as the strength of her kiss woke me up from whatever world I had lived in up to that instant and I opened my eyes to something so amazing that it belittled ambition, shrank pride, and placed the world on the edge of a blade for the sheer exuberant playful essence of its existence. And then she grew weaker and her lips dropped away from mine and the weight of her body rested backwards onto my arms and she smiled and her eyes closed. I knelt down between the seats in the carriage and cradled her beautiful body. I buried my face in the furs of her coat and looked up around me and noticed the snow for the first time, and the thin dark shapes of the trees around the clearing. I began to cry, and when I woke up I was still crying, and I carried the sadness, which was very real, within my waking self for three days.

The fantasy and the reality had a year between them.