He was approached early one morning by an apparition.
The vision of a kind of life he had never imagined but repeatedly wished for his own: the kind you read about in novels.
It stepped into his room just before the alarm clock went off and it spoke to him in a language he understood, it leaned over his bed carrying the scent of a woman who knew him better than he could have ever learned to know himself. It spoke to him in a tone he could have never heard coming from someone in any other way but the way it presented itself to him, as the only one who would ever be ready and willing to take him in: a mother and lover beyond a shadow of a doubt. Not just one woman, the woman: an irrefutable fact.
She had come as a whisper first, than as a whole figure. Her eyes smiled and so did her lips; the fullness of her hair smelled of the ocean. She was it – he figured.
Then the alarm clock rang. The squeaky sound shattered perfection to pieces: it was only an illusion after all and he was left to pick up the bits and pieces, hoping to put it all together before long.
A perfectly normal week came along and then a second perfectly normal week kicked in and then a third. A month or two, maybe three, twelve even. Two years, maybe more or less, who knows?
She never came back, the apparition. The scent of ocean never returned in the fullness of her hair in the middle of a dream but he knew, oh he knew… life may grant you with the quality of reason but it will never grace just anybody with the talent for recognizing sheer virtue and he had it: he had just been graced.
It was now in the books, the time would surely come. It always does.
