Two Years, One Day

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.