I am walking on flood water, my feet are tired, which means I have been walking for quite a while. Strange thing about the flood water, it is clear; clear like tap water. I hear the jingling of coins and I look around and there are dimes and nickels everywhere.
In the first dream, I hear a voice and I turn my head. I see Benjamin standing against a wall. He's wearing a faded army green golf shirt. I do not see his face, yet I know it is him. I wake up.
The second time the dream repeats, I see Benjamin again. This time he turns around and looks at me. I call his name. I wake up.
This morning, as I go through the dream sequence, I resolve to not wake up so I know what happens. Benjamin's face is serious. He is not his usual self. Benjamin always smiles. Facing him, I touch his arm, the lean yet strong arms that once held me when we were young. He smiles at me, briefly. Why the sad face? I ask. He turns his head and just like that his image fades away from me.
I did not want to open my eyes; I willed myself to go back to sleep. I could see the clear water, it is cold. I could hear the jingling of the coins. I could see a shadow, Benjamin's I reckoned, walking away. I heard a loud ringing. It was my phone. I looked at the digital clock on the table by the foot of the bed. 6:27, the red letters almost fading in the bright morning sunshine.
In the shower, it came to me. A realization. A recollection. It was the same dream I had dreamed when I was still a young girl, barely ten years old. I stood in the middle of the bathtub, water running down my skin like tiny rivers. I closed my eyes, forcing myself to look back at that dream. Was there more that I forgot?
I finished my shower. As I stepped out of the bathtub, I jammed my knee on the edge and I almost lost my balance. I grabbed hold of the towel rack. For a split second, the whole bathroom spinned and I thought I was going to have vertigo yet again. Then it dawned on me: I saw Ben in my dreams eight years before I met him. Why would I have to remember this after fifty years?
My best friend in high school, Carmencita, and I did an experiment for a year. We recorded the times we thought of each other when we were not in school. We kept a log in our notebooks and would compare them the next day. She used her wrist watch, but because I didn't have one, I depended on the radio or the little cuckoo clock on our kitchen wall. Our logs showed that we thought of each other at almost the same time, sometimes a minute or two off. We also logged what we were thinking at the time and ninety percent of the time, we thought of the same things.
Could it be that I have been thinking of Benjamin a lot lately? I couldn't understand why. I didn't want to attribute it to my age. Or maybe he's thinking about me.
I am wary of going to bed, I don't want to dream the dream if it's a harbinger of things to come.
