Just as time strings cobwebbed garlands around my house faster than it does in others, love slips soon into my dreams of longing sooner than for most. My mother used to say that waking dreams come true.

Even when I rub my eyes open, he stays behind like the memory of a Sunday fair on a Monday morning, a dream that dreams on in the corners of my eyes till sunlight shoos him away.

“Rewrite” - the red marks fill my notebooks but the writing is not of my hand, grown fickle and fake with cursive copy writing impositions but the shapely strokes and parallel lines of his own steady hand.

Language forfeited, he sinks fast like foam following scuttling crabs into sand secrets. His face has sworn to taunt me namelessly like the waves that punish my feet for not having stayed longer for one more wave. And when I want to call him back to me when he’s at the water’s edge, I will forget his name and one more dream will have banished him to anonymity.

In the balcony of my childhood home, I can hear the temple drums again; the dream drums out the hymn note-perfect as Ganesh leaves one sanctum for another in a palanquin. It might be hymn to him for he too has leapt from dream to dream braving sphinxes at the mouth of a labyrinthine sleep, not in a palanquin but in a pall, his name dying on my lips. People who die in your dreams live forever, my mother used to say but people who never die swap their mortality for memory. He will not remember my dreams, remember that he has crept into each of my pubescent peephole tears only to turn his face away from a past where pain has been spray dried over walls of time like the afterthought of a vandal.

The stream wouldn’t glisten with fallen sunbeams the way it did if the wind didn’t send the swan’s wings aflutter and if the swans didn’t make rippling silver stripes in the lake.
Soon, the rains will scrub names off epitaphs and tipple flowers off gravestones - when he refuses to leave at the clang of the school bell, before the door bolt jams, prior to the first word of a confession, he won’t leave when the eye of my sorrow is still wet. And will they have leave to die if he dreams with me only to unearth the ruins of a love long-deceased?