It happened as I was walking past a booth, those ones selling cotton candy. You don’t see those around much anymore. Maybe that’s why it hit me like that – a light, a flash, quick in the darkness, like a bolt of lightning that suddenly illuminates a familiar scene made black by night. The layers peel away, black gauze curtains dropping to reveal a forgotten stage.

Those dreams I had so long ago when I was still a little boy in trousers with scraped knees; the colours so vivid and everything so real that I could still feel myself there after I awoke. Those dream-rich creatures: speaking animals, magic makers, all there to share my world.

This suit of mine, the costume I don as I navigate the shadow world of my every day. The bleating of my alarm, the runny egg breakfast, the morning paper and the fly’s buzz, buzz incessant in my ears. Is there a place there still for me? An empty table set with saucers and plates? A loyal dream menagerie frozen in still life? A place for me to leave my drab shadow self behind?

What happened then to those that I forgot when my colours turned to grey and the music faded from my ears; the magic faded from my heart?

I was walking through dark streets – narrow twisted alleys reeking of urine and spoilt fish. I was following a ghost trail, the invisible umbilicus of someone else’s dream. Their dream face, their wrinkled, weathered hands, their strange and dark compulsions.

I stopped at a place so piercingly familiar, yet a place that I had never been to, never even thought of or imagined in the vaguest way.

Upon stopping there a woman’s laughter, vibrant and youthful, rang like a thousand little silver bells that turned into the saddest song I had ever heard as it settled in my heart.

Though I never saw her face, my brown, wrinkled hands pressed up against the glass and my stranger’s mouth expelled one long mute howl that once rang out her name.

It had never occurred to him before, that even the way the birds sang would be different.

The sounds of birds, the sight of them perched amidst the fall leaves, was so familiar. But it was the melody that was different.

Even as he watched one, its head bobbing up and down in jerky, jaunty movements, he marveled at the subtle difference.

When he reached his mother's home he stood, hesitating for the smallest fraction of a second, before he sighed once and stepped through the doorway.

It was exactly as she had described.

As he walked through the narrow hallway, lit by the gentle light of a dwindling afternoon, he could imagine how it had been. The floral wallpaper, torn and water-logged, still cheerful where the petals stood their ground against the encroaching mold.

He could still sense the whisper of warmth, like the feeling he'd had many times leaving a warm house and stepping into the cold. Something was still lingering there, something nice.

He clutched the photo in his gloved right hand, encountering a narrow staircase adjacent to what was left of a kitchen that must have smelled, once upon a time, like strong coffee, fragrant teas and latkes.

Up the stairs he went; one foot at a time, focusing on each step carefully, giving it his full attention, as he had done every day for the last six months.

This intentional myopia made it easier. It gave his mind a direct and simple path.

At the top he stood in an open room. This was it. Even the ancient plush chair that she had sat on. He held up and studied the photo. It felt a lot like being in two worlds, like a split screen between the future and the past. The longer middle section - the richest and most detailed one - was cut out. What was left was pure contrast.

There she sat, all curls and teeth, in a dress so frilly and homemade that no modern girl would be caught dead in it.

Her hands clutched a little paper mache doll and the southern light coming in from the window lit up her hair with a gentle glow. That expression, like she thought everything was a little joke, something to be taken lightly, stayed with her up until the very end. Those curls may have gone and those teeth had shrunk into proportions more suitable in an adult's face, but that look - man, that look! That had mom written all over it.

He smiled remembering that and still holding the photo went over to the window to hear those birds sing again.