dreamwalker

Freddie doesn’t really think too much about it when she bumps into the man. It’s New York after all, and the sheer number of tourists she puts up with on her walk to the store is a statistic all on  its own.

Except when she looks up to glare, everything stops.

She knows him. She knows him she knows him she knows him. Better than her best friend. Almost better than herself.

Because this man, with his too-obvious trench coat and scruffy beard and disheveled hair — this man who looks like a hipster Bogart — has walked her dreams every night since she turned nineteen.

When she was a child, she wanted to remember dreams, clung to every sliver of them as she rose to wakefulness. Like so many of her friends, the dreams became less clear, less defined as she grew older. Hints of movements or landscapes, the sense of foreboding or elation, colors. Those she remembered.

But on her nineteenth birthday, she woke up with a scream, sweating through her George Michael t-shirt, with this man’s face burned in her mind.

It’s been ten years since he first appeared, but every night, without fail, he visits her. Most nights, he’s somewhere in the distance, the trench coat flicking by in her peripheral, the hint of mussed hair bobbing over other dreamy figures.

The night her father died, the man had walked up to her in the middle of Regent’s Park where she stood in the middle of the pond as queen of the ducklings. He hadn’t said a word, just stood at the edge of the water studying her face. When she woke, the heaviness in her heart had melted away, as though nothing had happened. And then she’d remembered her father was dead, and she cried until she fell asleep again.

So yes, she knows him. Knows his dark eyes and tilted mouth. Knows how he walks, hands in pockets, collar flipped up.

Except she isn’t asleep. She knows she isn’t because she pinches her thigh and digs her nails into her palms and draws blood when she bites her lip too hard.

He is here, now, in front of her, in the middle of a busy street in New York City, as the man with his Starbucks pauses mid-sip and the woman with her briefcase is caught mid-step.

And the world has quite literally stopped.