Chapter Five - Dreams of reality

He woke in a daze and relished the brief moment between his dream world and his reality. He sat there still and quiet, trying desperately to reconstruct the oddities of his dreams. There was a phone call from his brother and a woman at a train station. The phone call seemed so real; so believable. He tried to shake the uneasy feelings that come from such a disturbing dream. Instead, he tried to concentrate on the pleasant part of the dream. The woman from the train station.

In a way that only dreams can, he jumped from wondering if they’d ever meet to dreaming they were walking through the winding roads of Venice, hand-in-hand, giggling like school children just learning how to love. It was such a wonderful dream and if it weren’t for the morning sunlight sneaking through the tread-bare curtains in his bedroom, it would still be enticing his senses.

As he sat on the edge of his bed, he began to think about the phone call. Surely, it was a dream, he told himself. But it seemed too real; the memory too detailed to be a hazy fragment of a night’s sleep. Could it be true? Could the woman who destroyed his life really be dead?

When he gathered the morning’s newspaper from the front step, he realized it was true. It was very, very true.

Certainly, he loved his mother. But he could never forgive her for what she did. He was in love. They were in love. Or at least he thought they were. If she really loved him, she never would have allowed his mother to send her away – no matter how much money was shoved her way. If Carmen had loved him, she would have married him despite his mother’s promise to disown him if he married so far beneath his station in life.

That was the final straw. He spent his entire life living the life his mother wanted for him, but for her to destroy the one thing he dreamt of was… unimaginable. He wondered sometimes if the fear of his mother’s meddling is what kept him from talking to that beautiful woman he used to see on his way to the library each day.

That beautiful woman! Oh, how he would miss seeing her each morning. He wondered if she would notice his absence today.

As he began packing for the journey home, his mind wandered to the woman from the train once again. Was all of that a dream or was she real? He tried to shake thoughts of her from his head. After all, he had a lot of other things to think about now…