Dreams

I almost never remember my dreams, but in this medication-induced sleep, they came in, lucid as reality. In this one, she was all grown up, and we were playing a travel related board game that required us to go from country to country with each throw of the dice. She was winning, and I had ridiculously bad dice throws. Fast forward to scene 2, where we were both in an English cab driven by a rather unfriendly Pakistani driver, who sped through the streets of Britain by night. We didn’t know where we headed, we only knew we were heading south (to France maybe). It seemed like an extension of that board game that we were both playing earlier. I got nervous and edgy and stopped the cab somewhere near the equivalent of Little India. We got off, and decided this wasn’t working out, we would have to head to Heathrow Airport instead to take the next Qatar or Emirates flight back to Singapore. Why we did not ask the driver to change course when we were still in the cab eluded me, but I recalled her paying the driver 100 pounds for the ride, even though we are now stranded in the middle of nowhere (fine, Little India, but still). “That’s too much!”, I exclaimed, to which she just led me away to one of the shops. We had to find our way to Heathrow airport but in finding our way around we bumped into a Chinese lady who was manning a cart filled with fruits and berries. She told us that we were very far away from Heathrow, but (perhaps to console us somewhat) offered me some mulberry / mini-grape looking berry which I promptly shared with her. She was no longer the little girl that left this world 11 years ago, but as grown up as I was. For some strange reason, I was not surprised and I didn’t ask any questions, but was just happy to be able to share sweet berries with her and watching her smile.

Come to think of it, she hardly spoke, but to be able to just enjoy spending time with her in this manner, just the two of us, was good enough for me. For that few hours, when we were both grown up in a parallel universe, I was happy.