Back To Neverland

I have a recurring dream. I am on a shore, walking along the edge of the water. Shells are lying around in the sand from the last tide. I feel the gentle waves lapping at my feet. A light breeze ruffles my hair. I watch the seagulls nesting on the cliffs in the distance. I have the feeling that someone is watching me. That feeling is drawing me closer to the strange bushes between the sand dunes at the foot of the cliffs. But then I suddenly wake up and everything disappears.

I’m not sure any more whether this place really exists, but it is my only consolation because I cannot walk. I’m sitting at my window all day, watching the world outside from my wheelchair. Whenever I fall asleep, I am dreaming of a world where I am walking on the shore again, running in the sand, and feeling the water lapping at my feet.

Once I dreamt that I was on a field trip with my high-school classmates. I was standing on the platform at a railway station, waiting for our train to come. I was with a girl called Susan. I looked at my watch and dashed off to buy a baseball cap. I even heard Susan shouting ”Don’t go away, honey! Our train could be here any minute.” I knew I did not have much time, but I bought a baseball cap wherever I went.

The station building looked as if it had been hit by a bomb. Its walls barely supported the badly damaged roof. The rays of the sun shone through the cracked tiles. I climbed over the ruins, and I found myself in an empty square with small buildings around. I went into one of them, a gift shop, and asked for a baseball cap.

”Sorry, we do not sell baseball caps.” said the lady behind the counter.

When I got back to the platform, the train was already leaving with all my classmates, including Susan, or at least so I thought. I managed to jump into the last railcar and started to look for them. As I made my way to the front of the train, I heard people singing a sad song about the land of our dreams that we would never reach. That made me even more desperate to find them: ”Am I on the right train?”.

They simply weren’t there. They might have left with another train. Probably I had been away for far too long. Then I woke up. It was the middle of the night and I tried to figure out who Susan was. Could she be my elementary school crush?

There was a girl called Susan, who was sitting next to me in geography class. I had a crush on her when we were fourteen, but I kept it a secret for almost twenty years. At a class reunion, I told her that I had been in love with her since I first saw her. To my surprise, she got very angry. If she had known, she said, her life might have been totally diferent because she probably would not have married her husband, one of our classmates, whom she divorced just after two years.

”You should have had more faith in us.” she said with tears in her eyes. She was inconsolable. Sitting in my wheelchair, I felt like I messed it all up, but it was too late to make it right.

If I had asked her for a date after a geography class, maybe my whole life would have been different. Maybe that accident would never have happened and I would be able to walk now. Who knows? Maybe, if we learn to trust someone, it could change us and our whole life too.

”Why didn’t you tell me you were in love with me?” she asked a hundred times almost crying. What could I say? ”I’m very sorry.” But would it change anything?

A few weeks later, I dreamt about Susan again. I introduced her to my mother, then we sat around a table and ate cake. It was the kind of cake my mother used to bake for my birthday. It was the house where we lived when I was a child. Even the garden looked the same, though I knew this garden didn’t exist anymore. The whole building was bulldozed long ago and there is a cornfield in its place now. At that point, I woke up and found myself staring into the darkness of my bedroom. My heart sank. ”Why did I just wake up?”

I also dream a lot about my accident. In my dream, I get up earlier than usual, take my backpack, put on my baseball cap and bike as fast as I can so that I avoid crashing into that truck at the crossing.

Poor man, he was responsible for the accident, but I don’t hold any grudges against him. He came to visit me in the hospital and brought me fresh orange juice every day. He just sat at my bed staring into space.

”Why did this have to happen?” he asked every time wringing his hands. Yes, that’s what I was also asking, but who could answer that? I know people who believe that everything happens for a reason. I would be curious what that reason was this time.

In my dream last night, when I was walking on that shore again between all those strange bushes, some of them extended their tentacles towards me. I heard voices from all directions. It was like coming to after my accident. I heard people speaking, but I did not know whether these were random voices or they were actually talking to me. I was not sure anymore.

”Is it a dream or am I in the hospital again?” But if so, what happened? I reached out, I wanted to touch those bushes, I wanted to feel whether they were real, but they recoiled. I saw those eyes, then I heard someone saying my name. It was probably Susan. Her words kept echoing in my head.

”Why didn't you trust me?”

”Trust me!”

”Trust me!”

Suddenly, I remembered what happened. I guided my wheelchair to the edge of the cliff. I was tired of the shore, of dreaming of Susan and me, hoping that in another time, at another place we can be together.

When I opened my eyes, Susan was sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Where am I? What are you doing here?“

”You should have trusted me.” She said holding my hand with tears in her eyes.

(Wordcount 1105)