Leaving.

I am due to leave the street named after an Australian city for the last time on Sunday.

This street was invented in a dream one night - the co-incidence is too theatrical to be real. Had Bluefish been Croatian, I'd have dreamt of Zagreb Street, and no doubt ended up living there just the same.

Following the path of Eben's Biblical creation (January 2009, links to an earlier post on here) when He derived the two halves of the universe, blue and red, in a long sleep; first I dreamt about an Australian girl, and she appeared to me on my computer soon after. A miracle!

I asked Eben, the gatekeeper of sleep, that she and I should miss each other so much that the loneliness would eat our souls, and lo it was done. We awoke so lonely that the circumference of the earth was as nothing to her - so ripe with love was Bluefish that the distance from antipode to antipode was less than the rotation of a pre-school globe.

Then I dreamt she came to England twice, completing a classic Ebenic dichotomy: we shared the red of summer sunburn in Cambridge; and the blue lips of winter in Budapest.

For my next dream, I visualised the difference between being awake and experiencing the dream-state - there would come a time when she would prove the whole thing was a dream by going and never coming back again. At some point, she would never return, I should be forced to wake up, and I'd then deny Eben, deny the dream. It never happened - I moved to this street because it was close to the train station. What other reason could there be?

I spent much of the day cleaning up the house, and artefacts of what I thought were a dream had leaked into here, this proscenium that framed us. A ticket from the day she left the first time, some four hours before her flight departed and severed our intimacy. A bottle of Timotei which had sat in the bathroom for months - a chess piece which I knew would signal checkmate as soon as I moved it. A sock which contains enough DNA to clone her and return her to me, intact and smiling and convinced by the sanctity of Eben's spell.

These are the last sorrowful relics of Australia, and the end of Eben's path, at least for now. I quietly observe the room where she sat, not like a ghost or a dream or the ghost of a dream, but as redemption from the past with no guarantee of the future; as the couple who flung themselves at Andromeda but mere earth was too much for them; the pair who looked the impossible in the eye, and blinked. Come Sunday, I shall have closure.