I had a dream about a woman named Elise. She relocated from wherever she had been to the deteriorating yellow house across the way, bringing with her the scent of foreign spices and the sort of sadness that makes air move. She wore linen as if it were armor, read books (which must have been very good ones) at the local bakery, and seemed altogether too serious for a woman who was, by a decent amount of measures, a pretty woman. She never smiled long enough for it to stick, and the village as villages do whispered about her. I watched, of course, and was watching the other evening when she rearranged her life with delicate defiance.
One night in that disorienting fog only dreams know I saw her in the field behind my house, next to the garden, barefoot, and carrying a letter. It was addressed, but not sent. Her lover, it turned out, had never arrived. Or maybe he had, just not as the man she had imagined in all those hours of waiting. She read me a sentence from the letter "We always want what reflects us, never what accepts us." I didn’t know what to say. Her eyes weren’t asking for comfort; they were searching for escape. I offered her tea. She declined and walked back toward the village lights.
When I awoke, there was no Elise. Only the smell of charred toast and a solitary crimson mug I have no memory of ever owning. I sat at the kitchen table and jotted this down, as if to pin a butterfly for future reference, lest it become myth. Dreams do deceive but some women, real or imagined, leave stains even sleep can’t wash off.
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