When he is thirteen, before he can even be rightfully called a man, he falls asleep and wakes up in deep in a forest, the sort of forest drenched in a thick haze, where light filters down to lush undergrowth and disappears. He will later discover, when he is in British Columbia, that this is a rainforest, but he doesn’t know this yet. He is lost, he knows that, but unafraid.

He sees her at the edge of his vision, just a glance. She is beautiful, the sort of beauty composed of opposites so well put together you don’t realise they’re opposites until much later, the dark and light superposed wonderfully, magically. Perfectly assembled for this dream-scape.

She is moving away from him, and in the peculiar logic of dreams, it seems to him worse to lose her that to become more lost in a place he has never before been.

Moving through the undergrowth, she almost out-paces him at every turn, but still he follows, deeper and deeper into the growing gloom.

Then finally he breaks through into a sort of clearing and she is staring directly at him. It seems for a moment all he can see is her almond eyes, deep brown, liquid, radiant.

He wakes up to his own bed, his own room. Every detail of the dream fresh in his mind, he vows never to forget. The years roll by, he becomes older and more prone to believe he’s wise, but he re-vows time and time again that he will never forget. And he never does.

He grows older but he still looks for her face in crowds. He spends ten years looking and convincing himself that this girl or that girl has inside themselves something that makes them like her. He is wrong, and he is wrong, and he is wrong again.

Then he sees her.

There is a moment when his heart simply refuses to beat, when all the blood in his body seems to have rushed to his head and stayed there, when the world spins down on its axis and time stops and all there is in the world is her.

But she is, of course, on the periphery of his existence, and when he manages to strike up a conversation she slips away. Over the ensuing months, she keeps moving away from him, an in the peculiar upside-down logic of real life, he decides to let her go.

She disappears and he settles for a simulacrum.

His life becomes a dream he can’t wake up from. He folds himself into the masses and tries to forget her, and sometimes he is successful. Sometimes fails desperately. He keeps himself too busy to think and finds his mind takes over and he is again elsewhere in dreams.

He awakes in the rainforest night after night. It is empty of life, empty as the distant reaches of space, oppressively silent. He calls her name out, for he has found it out, silence broken and flung into the air like a flock of birds. Nothing. He wakes up. Nothing.

In the years proceeding he finds someone. He falls in love or something like love or something she will come to call not love at all, though that will be after the fact. He settles on her. He settles for her. She leaves him, leaves him, leaves him, leaves him fraught with the ever-present dread that she will leave him. Finally, he leaves her, like a coward he leaves her, or she leaves him and it is all over and there is nothing but ashes and fall-out remaining.

Deep in the ashes of it all he dreams, he remembers another her, deep in a forest. He remembers finding her. He realises everything is not lost.

When he is twenty-five, before he can rightfully be called a man, he wakes up and understands that it matters, and that it always has mattered. He can’t convince himself otherwise, though he has tried.

It is as if he has emerged from the ocean and can see as he was meant to. She has always been there, even when she was not there.

One day, she touches his arm ever so slightly, so shyly, so impossibly, and he somehow knows what she is and will be. He gathers her into his arms and looks down and it seems for a moment all he can see is her almond eyes, deep brown, liquid, radiant. There is in him a flash of untamed fear that he will wake up. But he never does.

Tags: fiction