It had been a passionate and sensual evening. I lay there on my big brass bed, slowly cooling down, feeling relaxed, satisfied. The room was dark. The drapes were pulled back. The window was cracked open to let in a little breeze.
The cool night air felt good.
She was already asleep, lying there, breathing softly in the dark. I could barely see her smooth naked back. Then the moon, that romantic sphere, peeped from behind the clouds, and filled the room with the softest of light.
Now I could see her more clearly.
Although she certainly needed her rest, my urge to reach for her was too strong to ignore. Pushing up on my right elbow, I extended my left hand toward her sleeping body. Ever so gently, I lowered my hand.
Something wasn’t right.
I began … to wake up … from my dream.
Sometimes I hate those kinds of dreams. I never remember the juicy parts. I think I know who I was dreaming about, a young woman I knew 30 years ago, when that very scene played out in real life. It wasn’t just a dream back then.
As I sat there on my bed, I noticed something. The drapes were pulled back. The window was cracked open. And my room was flooded with soft moonlight. Perhaps, that is what triggered the dream. Somehow my old sleeping body sensed the moonlight and drifted me back into the dreamland of a time when I did not always sleep alone.
Without turning on the light, I stood up and walked around the bed to the window. The moon was beautiful and bright, suspended out there in that clear blue-black sky. Tomorrow I would have to take my rented lens, a Nikon 200 to 500 mm lens, to UPS. The rental period was over. I had attempted to take photographs of the moon in the past, but I never had a lens that could reach out to 500 mm. Now was my chance to get a good shot.
I flicked on the light by the bed, slipped on a pair of sandals, grabbed my camera with that long lens on it, and went out into the backyard. I took several shots and then came back in, turn on my computer, uploaded the files from my camera and looked through what I captured.
As it turns out, even at 500 mm, the moon is a long way away. Surprisingly, when I cropped in on the best photo of the bunch, the moon was still quite clear. Today’s photo was my best effort at capturing the moon.
I turned off the computer, slipped off my sandals, flicked off the light, and went back to bed. By then, it was well-passed midnight, but I wasn’t sleepy, not sleepy at all. I lay there, remembering the dream, trying to remember what it was like to be that young, trying to remember what it was like to be with someone as beautiful as the girl with the smooth naked back, lying there asleep in the moonlight.
For some reason, those thoughts were not pleasant. Perhaps it was too long ago. Perhaps it wasn’t right to think about someone so long after the relationship was over. As I recall, it did not end well. Maybe that’s why it felt wrong to think about it, to think about her.
And so, I decided to do the next best thing. I took several deep breaths to relax me. And then I turned over on to my side, a position that helps me sleep. It would take a while, but eventually I would drift off.
And maybe, just maybe, I would dream.