A dream about a mandora player
A dream too sweet to wake up from, nurtured by the sound of heavy rain and the soft puffs of cool breeze from a wet garden. For the first time in weeks the air is moving and the stagnant humidity is gone.
Many years ago I watched you play some ancient stringed instrument a mandora or a lute. You were self-taught and the moving machinery of the muscles and tendons in your forearms as you played intrigued me as much as the concentration on your face.
Now, I look down and I see your arms around me and that rush of excitement comes back. There are no other sounds, no yelps from children. Your breath is warm on my neck. The house is unfamiliar to me, the bookcase, the smell of old paper and mildew. But you smell fresh caught in this moment between emotional distance and intimacy. The most delicious moment in any human interaction, I wish that it should be suspended in amber. Then, in the future, when our words have inevitablly gone sour I could hold that moment in my hands and close to my heart instead of rummaging around for in my head.
Instead, I linger in bed, enjoying for once the feeling of calm, the sensation of hope, the certain knowledge of freedom.
In dreams we sometimes find the way forward.
