It is said there are hardly any people given to you to love. If he hadn’t slickly turned his brown neck that husky evening he would have missed her and she would have floated back into the mist if she had not stopped in stupor at his sunlit smile.
A cloak of stars started on a heaven bound journey that dusky evening. With one movement of his head he turned and in that minuscule of a second she was hurled into his sight. Destiny in a long robe and a scythe in one hand stood with bated breath watching. The evening hush was dense and pulsating with the cries of cricket and the heavy scent of incense. The brooding, lengthening shadow of the trees enveloped the enchanted hills. Nature crouched on all fours behind the gnarled itchy tree and sensed a beginning without an ending here.
She wafted into his dreams smelling like freshly squeeze oranges. “What are you?” he asked startled, shattering the silver strain of star light that shivered in the wind. “The Queen of Fantasy,” she replied, teasing, flicking her dark tresses, advancing slowly, inching towards him draped in red, her eyes glowing like sirens of the sea and a long serpentine smile looming under her dark eyes, embraced by the swirling fog like a nymph rolling up the hills.
He stood shining in the dark; a brown, tawny glowering face breaking into a smile with feline grace. His eyes were twin flames like embers in the dark and as his face grew closer they glinted like as if the universe had conferred him all the sparkle of the North Star.
“Who are you?”she murmured.
“The King of Dreams” he replied.
They slowly arched like shooting stars trailing down a sky, free falling, weightless, backwards and tumbling into a seamless bottomless pit with a million desires mounting and rising in the tangle of hair, awakened dead cells, skin and curves.
The Queen of Fantasy and the King of Dreams loved suddenly, completely and unknowingly with that strange bitter sweet ecstasy of crystallised certainty and a blur of uncertainties, between the dark and the light in between the soul and the shadow, born in the wings of love, flamed by the pangs of desire.
Sometimes they met under an arched eye brow, in a cupid’s bow over the curve of a lip, in the hollow of a brown neck where two bones were a breathtaking velvet seconds away or in the corner of the eyes. Moving, marking, memorising contours of a face, the curve of a shoulder and the certain way a nail stuck to fingers, as their souls awakened to the gentleness of a moving prayer.
They floated through mangled crowds in a nameless town that dimmed into a cloudy backdrop of a dream. In the half light and the sea roaring in the sound of conch shells and a flight of pigeons zigzagging in a dash of grey and white, cooing a love song.
Unhindered, unrestrained and unbridled they met a hundred times in quaint havens fanning out like the pages of a book, greenish blue mountains where fireflies like embers sailed and disappeared into a purple cloud transformed into an eternity of a dream, where paper boats stuck in the timeless infinity of a smile.
In the silver arc of a river flowing as far as your eyes could see that raced in the core of a loved ridge where souls of ancient ancestors rested by its banks with the eyes of old hermit, and silhouettes on mountain tops ebbed and grew every sunrise and sunset. In a subtle foggy blur of gray and the orange tinge of a dying light and in the white stillness of moonlit, mountain trail and clouds raining down on moss.
They tiptoed in a canvas painting where the west wind made love to a flower goddess, under a mantle of flowers where he traced a long burning trail of kisses on her navel. On a cloud steeped with raindrops, under twirling flowers that spun like a top in the wind atop a mound enveloped by a breeze, under a moon ringed with a rainbows hanging on a navy blue, brooding still sky and slow danced in a sky of stars.
If he hadn’t slickly turned his brown neck that husky evening he would have missed her and she would have floated back into the mist if she had not stopped in stupor at his sunlit smile.
When mornings set in and dawn came breaking in screeching with the daylight noise they stole into the memories of the night. For a time that felt like eternity she floated noting down the fantasies that unfurled in crooked brooks, sunflowers shooting yellow light, sailors weeping over dead seagulls. He took moon beams, spider webs, strands of lace and feathers from a white dove, wove them into gigantic, panoramic kaleidoscope of dreams with lilting lyrics, skin, bones, hair, limbs, whispering silk, pages unfurling, spring settling, winter gatherings, a twinkle of baby eyes and dropped them into her eyelids heavy with sleep.
She swooned in the dreams he spun until they met again in that dark, dense hush of a hill and rested their faces on palms sitting on the turret of a church that over looked a long row of green houses with snaking glittering trails. They met in muted lights, the garish colours turning into a foggy blur of gray and nature turning to the orange tinge of a dying light.
The Queen of Fantasy and the King of Dreams loved suddenly, completely and unknowingly with that strange bitter sweet ecstasy of crystallised certainty and a blur of uncertainties, between the dark and the light in between the soul and the shadow, born in the wings of love, flamed by the pangs of desire.
