X

The most pleasant dream you've ever had. The one where you can jump from the top of the stairs and fly. The one where you have no need to walk, or run, or think, or perceive. The one where you find yourself in a dream, inside a dream, inside a dream, inside a dream.

You are perfectly formed and perfectly minded. A hand, a foot, an eye, a thought, a belief; they are all rolled together into an understanding you can't explain and could never have imagined. Words and feelings are your fingers and toes, and memories are folded together like downy feathers under your wings. You are the leader and the follower and the hope and the desire.

You don't feel cold or burn in the sun; you can smell the warmth and the light as if it filled and saturated every sense. Nature, brimming with colours and tastes, as light falls on your face wherever you turn. The sea and the rivers lift you to mountain tops where snow is the stars, the forest is your hair, and the moon is your oyster.

Where all those you love are gathered together, in a time when the clocks froze in the past, the present  and the future. In a place you've been but never been. Past animosity or petty disagreements never happened; the newspapers are blank pages because language is just a soft blanket. There are no circumstances, no time, no other places than here. No painful moments, no debts or disasters of any kind you can remember. The animals you buried in gardens over the years are all there - you wonder why you thought they were gone, because nothing is gone. Nothing is done. This moment and every other moment is right. It is all here, it is all overwhelmingly now.

The world is as big as an infinite expanding universe, so you can survey it all in the knowledge that none of this matters. All your beauty and every single drop of your being is captured here. This is where you were before you were born. You were flying.

This is the dream that happens when you die, X. 

We continue on, in a world where this dream gets forgotten. We feel we have lost a limb, a ventricle, a life-giving artery. Normality has altered and nothing will ever be the same. The mothers and fathers ache for you. We feel the loss of those first days with the life you created, and ultimately sacrificed yourself to bring to us. We fall into the void you leave, only to emerge, bruised and exhausted somewhere we never imagined. Somewhere in the blackening dust of reality. We feel your loss whilst you are dreaming. We burn with the injustice of what shouldn't have been your story. The ending was all wrong. All wrong. 

There are no words that can deliver you back to our world, nothing to comfort, nothing to believe. But comfort comes with time and belief is in the eyes of the boy with the full head of hair - he is our connection between our dream and yours. In our world, there are no wings. 

You're in your dream now, dear X. You're jumping off the top step.