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Awake at 3 a.m.I dreamt of you just now
or did I? Like you, long dark hair hung down like a mantle around a face so fair and she wore her slender form with simple grace. But the face wasn't yours, especially the eyes, which held neither the strength nor the tenderness of yours. The dream played out before my sleeping mind like a seventies love story in movie form. You know the sort with wide collars and shallow hearts? We wed -- or at least the woman wed the man that I was in the dream -- and children arose (as they often do). I loved the dream children as I loved the dream you but she left me and I followed, again and again, with growing children whose disenchantment rose with each pursuit. Yet I still loved her even when I could find her no more and had to go on. I raised the children then stayed at a place of refuge (perhaps an inn?) only to bleed the tale of my lost love to a stranger who in the end turned out to be her. The eyes of her heart opened at last in the dream to my love for her and then this dreamer awoke with only a fading memory of a dream on the verge of a happy ending. So I sit now awake and recalling a life that never happened and a love that triumphed not For it was only a sappy dream that I would have never paid to watch in the movie theater. Yet even now the dream lingers in my solitary heart. Was it a dream of a movie or a dream of you? + By John Rieping |
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