The Impossible Dream

I opened my eyes. At first, I had to ball up my fists and rub my eyes to make sure they were working properly; when the bursting balls of light dispersed, I realised I wasn’t seeing things. My eyes weren’t playing tricks on me – I really was here.

The room – if it was a room – was white, and there was no clear break between wall and floor, though this could have been due to a thin layer of wispy white fog floating above the ground. I stared at it for a while, confused; I felt no warmth and no cold, so why was there fog?

Brushing it off, I decided to wander, to explore and see if there was any more depth or interest in this strange place. I stopped after a few steps, pausing to study my moving. My gait was significantly more graceful in this foreign place, my movements more fluid. Each step was smooth and silent, each gentle sway of my arms flowing to my fingertips as if like a liquid.

It was only then that I noticed what I was wearing. The clothes were so unlike me, in colour, cut and style, even the type. I was always a dark coloured jeans and t-shirt girl, but here – wherever here was – I wore only a long white dress that flowed behind me.

“Where on earth…?” I started.

I cut myself off, fascinated by the sound of my own voice. It was softer, almost like a breeze passing through wind chimes. I became suddenly aware of the fact that wherever I was couldn’t be real, and found that I disliked the person I was in this place. I missed my rough, alto voice, my sloping, boyish walk and my thick, bulky clothes. I was everything I’d ever wanted to be, and I hated it.

“You can change it if you like,” came a voice from nowhere.

“What?” I replied, wincing slightly at the way my words sounded.

“You can change it,” it repeated. “All you have to do is think.”

I looked all around me, it slowly dawning on me that I knew this voice from somewhere that I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t find the source of the sound, and instead decided to try and apply the advice it had given me. I closed my eyes, and wished to be me.

When I opened my eyes again, everything felt better. My toes were cosy, tucked away in socks and comfy trainers. Dark blue skinny jeans hugged my lower half, more comforting than I’d ever felt them. A t-shirt with a quirky message emblazoned on the front clung to my torso, half covered by a large hooded jacket that hung loosely off my frame. My long hair was tied back in a tight ponytail, my sloping fringe tickling the lashes of my right eye.

“Ah,” I sighed, thrusting my hands in my jacket pockets. “Much better.”

I smiled at my voice being back to normal, happy to bid farewell to the dulcet tones that reminded me of some storybook heroine I couldn’t care enough to remember. Satisfied now with my appearance, I resumed looking around for the familiar voice.

“Looking for me?”

He seemed to fade into existence, created from the fog like Adam from the earth. He smiled almost shyly at me, but I could only stare back. So young, so fresh faced – like I’d never known him before. He sauntered slowly closer, all I could have.

“Where are we?” I whispered, any confidence I’d mustered during his entrance ebbing away as he smiled once more.

“Now that, would be telling,” he chuckled warmly.

My eyebrows knotted together and I puzzled over his words, my mind filled with concentration and mild frustration. This was all feeling just a little silly, and I was a little miffed that I didn’t know what he knew about this strange place. I decided to be direct, but found I didn’t have the heart to be firm.

“But I want to know,” I replied slowly.

He raised a finger and ticked it back and forth like a metronome, his head shaking lightly in time, the smile still playing on his face. I was reminded of being younger, when I would ask my parents what gifts lay under the Christmas tree; my frown deepened.

“Fine,” I conceded, my shoulders sagging in resignation.

“But I can tell you this – you have control,” he said simply.

“How do you mean?” I asked, confused.

He chuckled warmly and I fought back a smile.

“You imagine it, it exists.”

I frowned again, not comprehending. I felt like I was sitting an exam where the questions were designed to be as ambiguous as possible, to frustrate as much as possible. My annoyance began to rise and I thought of my favourite song in an attempt to quell it. As soon as I did, the tune began to play somehow, from some invisible sound system.

“How…?”

“You imagine it, it exists,” he replied simply.

Something inside my head clicked and I understood. Smiling to myself, I decided to carry out a cautionary trial, an experiment in the extent of my power in this world. Closing my eyes, I thought of piping hot pizza, one just for me, that was sprinkled with all manner of vegetables. When I opened my eyes, a squat table had appeared. I approached it slowly, and grinned when I saw the pizza from my mind lying on a plate, square in the middle.

“This is brilliant,” I reflected quietly, imagining the pizza and the table away.

“It’s your blank canvas, to do with what you wish,” the man from before announced, walking over to me.

He smiled as I turned to face him, his stance casual. His head was cocked to the side as if he was studying my reactions. A question came to mind.

“So, how come you’re here, as the… I don’t know… the host, I guess?” I asked, sitting down on a plump armchair I had that second wished for.

This made him chuckle, a little darkly, and he looked up through his lashes at me.

“You thought me here.”

I felt my face flush red and willed a glass of water into my hand, which I swiftly took a huge gulp of in an attempt to cool myself down. Of course I’d thought him up – I was often thinking about him.

“Oh,” was all I could return, my voice several notes higher than usual.

He chuckled darkly again, and I wished for an electric fan. The breeze soothed my flaming face and neck, and I took another drink from my water, which looked untouched. He began to walk away, his hands loosely knotted behind his back as he went. I got up, all of my imaginings disappearing as I did so, and followed him.

As I walked, the whiteness seemed to terrorform around me. Grass sprouted out of nowhere, with little pastel flower heads popping up every few yards or so. Overhead saw the forming of a sky that was such a blue I’d never seen before, with a spattering of thin, wispy, white clouds floating lazily about. There was no sun, though the light gleamed down on me.

The infinite space became finite – a beautiful meadow stretching up to a quaint cottage with a white picket fence. I frowned at the cliché and instead imagined there a low, rustic stone wall, which replaced it almost immediately.

“It’s beautiful,” I mused, looking around at the newly formed homestead.

“Quite,” the man called back, looking around at me and cracking another smile.

He stopped about five hundred yards from the front door and turned to me. I seemed to instantly know what to do. In front of where he stood appeared a small, square patchwork blanket and a picnic basket. He smiled again – my heart thudding as he did so – and sat down to one side of the basket.

I imagined sitting next to him and all of a sudden, I was. I pondered the ability to alter time and space in this realm, and was glad of the allowance for my own laziness. My thoughts were interrupted promptly as the thought of being as close to him as I was dominated my mind.

As a distraction, I busied myself with exploring and emptying the picnic basket, though it proved not as brilliant an idea as I’d hoped – I knew what was in there because I’d made it so.

I began to eat silently and he did also, and I found myself gazing out across the vast meadow; the now visible sun was beginning to set. Soon, we were finished eating, the basket done away with to some other part of my mind, and I was laid back watching the sky turn from day to night in the most brilliant of colours.

He lay down next to me and I imagined him with ideas of his own – it didn’t change him. Shyly, I edged sideways and closer to him, keeping my eyes to the now night sky that was alight with a million stars.

“What do you want to do now?” he whispered, not looking at me.

My racing heartbeat and galloping stomach were almost palpable in the atmosphere – the air was almost vibrating around me. The images of what I wanted infected my mind and I couldn’t shake them off. I heard him chuckle and blushed deeply. I heard him turn slowly to his side but was frozen myself, unable to tear my eyes from the stars. As his fingertips brushed my cheek, I took in a breath sharply and closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, everything was completely different. I secured my vision upwards, not taking in the surroundings I had created, and my eyes met with the smoothly drooping fabric ceiling of a four poster.

I sat up, embarrassed by what my mind had created, to see the curtains tied up neatly at each post – I could see the entire room from where I sat. It was French looking, with ornate wooden furniture and lots of pink and white. There was a white door directly opposite me, but the room was empty of people.

Looking down, I was unimpressed by my attire. The only things I wore were white cotton underwear, and a thin pink robe. My hair was down and loosely curled about my shoulders, and the nails on my fingers and toes were French manicured and pedicured.

I got up from the bed, making to look around in more close detail, and imagined myself in a knee-length white nightgown, though kept the robe. I added white fluffy slippers to my feet and willed my hair into loose plaits; it felt more comfortable.

He crept into my mind again and I wondered where I had imagined him to. No sooner had I thought about him was he walking through the white door, a hand behind his back. He smiled broadly at me, and I grinned back as I tied my robe tight around myself.

“For you,” he whispered when he was barely a foot from me.

From behind his back he produced a large bunch of white roses – my heart about skipped a beat. There were at least twenty, all of them long-stemmed and perfectly bloomed, with dew drops still adorning their petals.

“They’re beautiful,” I replied, my voice high and quiet.

He placed them in a vase that had appeared on my bedside table and arranged them so that there were no gaps between the petals. The lamplight that illuminated the room seemed to bounce off the dew drops and create the shadow of a starry sky on the ceiling, and I was mesmerised by my own creation for a second.

“They’re nothing compared to you.”

Blushing, I considered how that was the response I had always wanted, and then realisation descended: I knew now that this fantasy that I’d created was everything I had dreamt about, and everything that could never happen.

To have him like this was impossible because time had happened in the real world. He was happy away from me, never knowing who I was or that I even existed, let alone that I wanted him so. He had seen the world and lived so many things that my short life couldn’t imagine; to have him in front of me so young, like me, was something I could only dream of.

Everything he did and said in this little world of mine were the things I wanted him to. This impossibility was alive because I simply wished it to be so. I made myself forget that it was all forged. Even though I knew, inevitably, that none of it was real and was wholly constructed by my own self, I didn’t care. It was what I wanted, and here I could live it.

“You know all the right things to say,” I smiled at him.

He was oblivious to my change because I made it that way. It was my utopia, my perfect world, and everything in it was supposed to be perfect, even me because I simply was me. He was as I imagined him to be, only perfect.

I took a step towards him, keeping at bay the emotions and thoughts that told me not to because in this world, they were wrong. There was nothing to ruin here because it was all fresh and brand new.

He responded perfectly, smiling back at me and also taking a step, and then another, and then another, until we were almost nose to nose. I blinked once, twice, and the third time I didn’t open my eyes.

The softness was so brilliant that it was almost unbearable as his lips gently brushed mine and his fingers slowly knotted themselves loosely with mine. My head began to spin like I was holding my breath and I sighed a contented sigh. He pulled away and I looked into his eyes, taking in every colour, every emotion, every depth.

I closed my eyes once more to a deeper blackness, and all at once felt like I was being pulled from a deep, warm river. My eyes squinted open and I gazed through the murky water at my decaying and departing fantasy. I knew what was happening but I tried to pull myself back because I wanted to have him a little longer.

My struggle proved futile and I could only watch as my perfect world with my perfect version of him grew more and more faint. The darkness leeched in from each corner and crept closer and closer, swallowing everything. I didn’t care about my perfect room or my perfect meadow. I only cared about my perfect fantasy of him. It wasn’t love but it was want.

The darkness of the murky river slinked closer to the centre where he stood, still smiling at me. I watched the roses disappear and with them, my starry sky. It surrounded him and paused for the time it takes to blink. Then, in fewer moments than it took for my heart to beat, his smile faded, and then his eyes, and all was black.

Seconds later, I opened my eyes to the plain walls and bright, morning sunshine of my bedroom in the real world. As the remnants of my dream faded while I rolled over and slowly sat up in my bed, the only things that were clear were two beautiful eyes, clear as day in my mind.

My perfect world was gone quicker than waking up.