Snowing in the Orient

This one is a kind of dream, where I'm lost and searching for my dream that has become lost to me...

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Well, here I am lost in the city as time takes a back street crawl and wish I was not missing my dream.

I see her through the smoke, love shining from her eyes, hair capturing light through the haze, dancing with my soul. But when the smoke clears some I find it is not Zen, just some mirage that looked like her. Then the edge of nowhere caught up with me big time as I look around at a sea of faces and each one of them hers.

I leave slowly on shaky legs trying to think straight and go back along the river full of dirty dead fish. I stop to look at them and wondered where the fishermen were, maybe off being gangsters or sex targets, but maybe they were looking for comfort as was I, and not finding any had gone home, should I care? Everything is normal. I don’t know why I think about Zen so much.

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Somewhere it is snowing on a mountain; somewhere a desert bakes a thousand snow-flakes; another somewhere is sleeping growing sure that she is somewhere like a flower towards the sun with too many somewheres somewhere else.

The morning comes with a busting head and things half remembered, bits and pieces coming back from the edge, a face, a conversation, her face glimpsed but I don’t remember from where. Then I remember, she was in the tree again last night as I came home, I saw her there with her arms around herself holding tight. Why does she haunt me so? As the days flow into one another all seeming the same with the night never ending everything is suffering except my music which I play for her, inspired by her mystery. Maybe that’s why she stays in the garden, just so she can hear the music.

I have to get her out of my head and lose this heart full of her face. I think to take a trip some place, just go.

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I drift through nebulous space unbound by any restraint, passing Andromeda towards the Milky Way. I have no past, no dreams, no future but this now. It is all in these cold, cold stars. I watch suns become wonderful with lesser orbs reflecting light like children revolving around the mother. Time has no meaning. Distance is just a pace out of sight. I encompass it all, yet all does not encompass me, except a small blue world; it is there that I am longed for; from there comes the only warmth reaching out to the farthest distances, I am drawn to the one that calls.

My personal stereo, plugged to my past, now, my heart, takes me for a trip in the music, up above the mountains to the starry blackness. There is a dance going on and I can see ghosts in and out of the music, pretty, light and easy. They are really shaking it and I want to join in with the prettiest one with the sea-wave hair and eyes of mystery blue impenetrable, shaking her stuff, with her laugh raised fabulously to the stars.

Then she is gone, just suddenly not there anymore. I turn around looking for her and find myself beside tracks with a goods train pulling away, so I start walking after it. A small snigger behind me makes me turn and there she is looking at me with her incredible smile so inviting like a dream in Paris. I don’t dare move in case she vanishes again.

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“What’s the matter,” she says, “afraid to play?” Then she is gone again, leaving only her red dress suspended for a moment without her, before it crumples to the ground. I walk over and pick it up and found it was such a flimsy thing, cotton, so light. “That’s mine!” came her voice, and a hand plucked it from my grasp into thin air. “Damn!” I said, “I bet she looked lovely without it.”

I turn my stereo off, take the ear-phones from my head and go looking for a beer. Where is she? Why is she playing games with me? I put the head-phones back on and listen to music that reminds me of a dancing girl I saw once in the Orient.
Hot sun, white shimmering houses beside a dusty road that stretches away forever, with a car in the distance motoring towards me. As it approaches I stick out my thumb. She is driving it. It slows down, pulls over, stops just up ahead and I run to it, pull open the door, scramble inside out of the sun and beam at…an old farmer going to town. My face drops twenty thousand feet and my heart follows after.

“Where are you going?” asks the old man. “Anywhere,” I reply dejectedly, staring at my feet as the car moves on down the road. I could have sworn it was her driving this car. Maybe I’ve got her on my mind so much I’m imagining her now in every face that comes along. When we reach the next town I climb out of the car into a heat-wave. I say goodbye to the old man and off he goes. Now what do I do here in this small stiflingly hot town in what seems like Mexico?

Across the road, music floats from a café as people sit around outside drinking beer or coffee. It looks very inviting so I saunter over and sit at an empty table and watch nothing much happening.

“Beer, senor?” said the woman, a waitress in white with long shapely legs leading my eyes up over her rounded hips, slim waist, breasts that hold my eyes for almost too long, to a face that smiles at me, leaving me speechless.

It is her.

All I can do is nod.

She walks away to get the beer and I wait, but a bell sounds from outside some kind of warning and I go to see what it is, but it is nothing and I suddenly know I should have stayed inside, for when I get back inside the café is deserted, no chairs, no tables. I can see nothing through the mists...

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I feel like a ghost wandering through time with nobody else around but memories and desolation.

From nowhere a wind blows and blows and I am frightened to stay upright, bending over into it, but it blows me down, tumbles me over and over. All becomes cold, freezing. My thin jacket no protection, my cotton trousers tearing on an unseen projection in the snow that is there as from some dream of winter. I crawl on hands and knees for what seems like hours, my strength almost gone.

Up ahead, a cave. I make my way towards it and with the last of my strength I crawl deep into it to get out of the wind driven snow and the freezing cold. As I crawl towards the back of the cave, I see a fire, someone bending over it. I am too cold to care about anything except to get to the heat of the fire. My teeth chattering, my hands under my armpits as I struggle to my knees every muscle in spasm over-drive, I crouch over the heat.

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It is too cold outside the cave and snowing. My heart is heavy without her. So travel I must now until I find her or forever wander these dark places without her light, without her laughter. I shiver over the fire. Gone, she is gone. A fever takes me and I crash to the floor. Someone bends over me, wipes my forehead and soothes me with comforting words. “Will you stay this time?” I ask.

“I will always be here when you need me,” she replied. I slip into a cold darkness that takes me away from her. When I awake I am drenched with my sweat but feeling better. I stand and walk unsteadily out into the light of day, stare at mountains in the distance, a landscape bleak and desolate, but there is a warmth within me as I set forth.

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