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Her eyes were green—slightly darker than peridot, slightly darker than the pristine waters at Abaco...they were vibrant with life and I looked into them as if by looking and holding the gaze I would hold her in my life and in her living. I wasn’t aware I was dreaming, I wasn’t really dreaming, but I was asleep, or rather, I was aware that this was a moment outside the time of wakeful passing. I was aware that I had to look at her, look at her vibrant green eyes in all their clarity and reality, dimension and being; it was up to me, to my unbroken visual and visible bond in seeing her that would sustain her and sustain me and sustain all the relationship that we had known my entire life. If I looked away, she would be lost to me. I made a mental note, too, of how the coloring of her eyelids matched that green of her eyes but not with the harshness of a teenager who might be experimenting, not with the cheap application of the shallow attempt to seduce, it was somehow a transfiguration, an appropriate compliment to her eyes, as if the color emanated from them like a prism throws light from the sun. There was a slight holding of my breath in that shadow of disbelief when gazing at someone loved and lost, having the perpetual body memory of embrace at the occasional physical meetings on holiday, that holding of breath in suspending the unmoving moment beyond time to absorb presence and recognize someone in soul while certain physicalities didn’t conform with certain memories. In shared life she was darker in hair color, and makeup—her lids were always a subtle red earth tone. Her eyes a fascinating gray like blue shadows over heather, the blue gray of distant appalachian mountains in mist. Striking beauty, heads would literally turn in double take when we were out and about. Her age had always been about 25 years older and while she did not look at all like a photo of her in youth, this was her soul gazing back at me through that color of green I cannot describe and is fading, dulling, shifting in the attempt. This “dream” did not have the timber of other dreams, it was not made of the same stuff. It was real. It felt like the clairvoyance I possessed when I was so young and prayed to have it pass. Now I regret that prayer. And now I have had this prayer answered. She was there with me. We shared our being, our connection, our selves beyond this material life but with the material that engages the senses. This time she did not touch me. When she was alive, I would dream of her and it would be the form of her I have always known and it would be her laugh and it would be our shared stories and it would be our walks along the beach and it would be her maternal embrace and it would be a visit that I always longed for and never had enough of and it would be her life without the hindrances of her commitments, and mine. But this was only being. This was only her face gazing back at mine, not looking like her but being her. I want to believe...that this was an outstretched affirmation that she is ... still ... living beyond this quintessence of dust and pain and heartache and situation. I feel her. I long for her. But not in the way I always had before in wishing I could figure out a way to travel to visit...but in a way that hopes beyond empirical doubts that there is more beyond this mortal coil and that we will BE in that space I glimpsed, that presence I felt, that connection I live in...
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