Bilder an einer Ausstellung

“Oh, I like to look at your picture, it reminds me of when I had a chance.”

The words of the song run through my head every night as I settle down to sleep. And I stare at your photo on the night-stand. Perhaps not the best time to have an image of you in my mind. It’s not as if I’m likely to forget your face.

I’m certainly not likely to forget the day you told me about Ronald. Your Ron. You and I had been dating just a little while, just long enough for me to feel we were getting into a routine, that this was something that was long-term, that we were “an item.” I remember all of it, the first meeting, the first date, the first cheliceral kiss. Just as I was getting used to you, you told me that you needed to see “other people.” Other people turned out to be just one person in particular, this Ron character. It took you a little time to come out with the truth. That you were seeing someone else. You’d been “a keeper,” yet somehow I had not kept you. Another lyric comes to mind: “All I’ve got is a photograph of you.”

Did you mean to be so cruel?

I try to distract myself. I know I’ve got to move on. So I put on headphones and flick through my laptop’s collection of music. Best to avoid pop songs, they so often tend to have lyrics about losing someone, wanting them back, remembering. I play safe by going for classical music. No lyrics there. By chance, I select Modest Mussorgsky – Bilder an einer Ausstellung. “Pictures at an Exhibition,” with its lopsided meter and varying time. I’m asleep before I realise the irony.

But what a charmed sleep I have. We’re back together again. We’re laughing and joking, enjoying each other and there’s no Ronald. He’s written out of the pages of my fantasy. It’s just you and me. For a while at least. Then, as night-time hours pass, a cloud creeps into my imagination. There he is, there’s Ronald.

It’s like a piece of cinema film being run in a loop through the projector. Frame by frame, I see our time together replayed – the happy part then the sadness, the coming of the depressive epoch of Ronald. But I don’t have to sit through this. I can walk out, like walking out of a movie theatre.

“I’ve had enough of this,” I say. “This is my dream and I am leaving.”

You look hurt, shocked. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, your dream?”

“This is my dream and I am going to wake up.” I rouse and I am gone from the dream-gone-bad and I’m lying awake shaking and sweating and feeling pallid in the dark as I snap on the bedside lamp and see the accusing witness of the alarm clock declaring the smallness of the hour. And, of course, your picture.

Why have I not the wit to remove it? I doze restlessly till morning and it – you – are still there.

The next night is the same. I slip into slumber as a submarine would slip beneath the surface of the ocean, into unconsciousness. The song words, “Dreams of you all through my head,” by Led Zeppelin play over and over like a mantra as theta rhythms take over my brain.

Then it is as if I have come through a tunnel and I am awake once more in the dream of being with you, as we first were. All is happiness, all is fine until, again, suddenly the idyll twists out of shape and Ronald looms.

“This is only a dream,” I tell you, “and I am waking up.”

“What dream, darling? What do you mean?” you ask, dismayed. But I have made my escape and lie awake in the darkness once more. Another night disturbed, reliving pleasure followed by heartache. Morning finds me weary, un-refreshed. Still not able to move on.

And still I do not remove your picture from my bedside. A third night draws on. I will take control, I will dream of us together and that’s how it will be, and Ronald will not appear to corrode the reliving of the dead relationship.

And it all seems to work. At first. We are happier together than ever. All my life should be like this. All my life a dream with you, captured like a postcard, freeze-frame.

Then Ronald appears. I cannot believe it. Surely you can command the imaginings in your own head. I turn on you angrily and swear. “I am going to wake up now, and destroy your photo that has haunted me from my bedside, and I will leave this lost dream and I will move on!”

“Oh no,” you contradict. “You are not going to move on. You are not going to wake up from your dream, because this is not your dream. This is my dream that you are in.”

Did you mean to be so cruel?

“You are in my dream,” you say, “where I am happy and you are not. And you are trapped in it forever.”

THE END