Dreaming of a New Possibility

 

I could have taken her away from here. We could have met as we normally did, as though we were just sneaking away together for one of our times away; one of those times when the work took us off to some other part of the country. This time, though, we would not have come back. We would leave it all behind. Walk out of these lives we live now and into something new.

I like to think – these days – that I would have done it for real. Despite all the problems and the complications, at the time it seemed so tempting.

We used to lie there, in some anonymous bed in some anonymous room, with the warm breezes fluttering the curtains and just talk, plan and scheme; create a new life for us together, far from the messes we’d both made of our lives.

We both spoke of our parents, and their generation, who’d stayed together but grown apart, living lives that only rarely touched. We decided we did not want to be like that. We wanted to walk together, hand-in-hand, across the beach as the sun set, even into our sunset years, growing older and closer as the years passed.

Obviously, though, it was all a dream and there comes a time when you wake up from a dream, no matter how much you would rather stay, there, inside it. The day came, as deep down we knew it always would, when that talk of dreams and plans faded into nothing, faded like a dream, and we found the only thing we had left to say to each other was ‘Good-bye.’