I had a strange dream last night. This is it. Something different for me.
I watched you, sitting on the barstool, quietly nursing your drink, as Mr smooth moved in like a peacock and left shortly afterwards, with his ruffled tail feathers between his legs. He had not been invited into your court and now he knew so. How could he not have seen that you were a Queen?
As I left the bar I offered a smile, half reverence, half apology for all men. You looked at me as if I was there, earthy hazel eyes and rust red hair, that did not just fall about your shoulders, but draped them like silk, those eyes soft, but piercing. I looked away and walked though the door onto a street that was shimmering a differnet shade to the one I had walked into the bar from, just an hour ago.
I wanted to go back the next day but felt the weight of my own imposition, my impetuous romantic projection, and so did not. But you clung to me like fog.
It was weeks later when I returned. There you were on the same barstool, a coffee cup and a real book in front of you. You turned your head and smiled, looking not at me but at the book under my arm. I shrugged, a kind of coy recognition or was it feigned humility, as I found a booth to sit in, ordering my coffee on the way from the bored young girl at the beginning of a much too long shift.
There were two other folk in the bar, neither of whom were reading books. An old man, leathered by life, sat staring into his teacup, swirling with the end of his days, a prophecy he seemed to be wishing would come soon, whilst a young hipster, all beard and lumberjack vibe, tapped a keyboard in ernest, wearing concentration as eyebrows.
I opened my book at the page I had marked and began to read not read, my eyes secretly burning into your being. Of course you caught me in the act and I flinched, coughed awkwardly as disguise, as if I had swallowed myself, and then moved my head, not anywhere quickly enough to avoid discovery, and looked at the page in front of me. The words there were dancing, swimming disorder, reckless and mocking my pretence. I felt myself blushing. A creep of shame. I heard my own voice lamenting my all to open gaze. My projection. My nemesis.
I looked up again and you were still watching me. You did not flinch and I was undone.
I returned to my poetry. The tumbling words now fell into a shape I could follow and as I read them my undoing birthed an ocean of regret.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.1
I looked up once more and you were gone, and I alone now with the divination of a prophet for company, and a shadow named Mr not so smooth, engulfing me.
William Butler Yeats. When You Are Old.
This made me think about how sometimes the most intense encounters in life are the ones that never fully materialise. They stay suspended, like an unresolved chord, haunting precisely because they were never given the chance to become ordinary. I find that kind of near-miss connection more potent than most actual relationships, because it allows imagination to do what reality often ruins. In my own life, I’ve had moments where I chose not to go back, not to follow through, and they’ve grown into entire private novels in my mind… not tragedies but reminders that the richest stories are sometimes the ones we keep unfinished.
It’s why I think we should be careful not to rush to “close” every loop or force closure for the sake of tidy endings. I like the strange kind of discipline of letting an encounter remain a question mark, an open-ended spell, instead of forcing it into the disappointing grammar of fact.
I like your dream, Paul!
Hauntingly beautiful.