Mount Cook Part 2
In the first dream, I am swimming in the swimming pool. I swim for hours, and the pool acquires a saline tang accompanied by a ghastly hue, the colour of the ocean. I swim for hours, ignoring the people around me, ships sailing by. I reach the edge of land and pull myself up onto the shore. Instead of sand, I feel the summer warmth rising up from the ground, the rustle of grass and leaves underfoot and in between my toes. The land rolls unbroken, hills verdant with lush grass and heather. I can feel the sun suffusing my bare skin with a pleasant warmth, not unlike that of the touch of a hand on my back. I walk, until I encounter the first person I see. He is leaning on a lawn-mower, a straw hat obscures his fringe but his eyes twinkle with familiarity.
I ask him, "Excuse me, but where am I?" His eyes, I have seen them somewhere before, the thought is a constant subliminal niggle at the back of my mind. He laughs. "Son, don't you know New Zealand when you see it?"
"No, there must be a mistake. I am in Singapore now."
Shrugging, he concedes, "Well, of course you are. But you're here too." And I remember that he is the gardener at Christchurch Park.
In the second dream, I am suddenly alone. The gardener is gone. The people are gone. Only the whisper of winds breathing secrets in your ear and the gurgle of the stream resound in the air. I squat down and bend over. I use my finger to write in the soil, tracing letters and punctuation as large as I can. It takes less than a minute to finish, then I stand up and move on; the writing to me is but mere lines in the sand.
When I wake up, I don't even realise that I can't remember what I had written.
.
Sometimes when I was bored, I would fantasize about going anywhere in the world. It would be a typically boring day with nothing to do at all, and I would be just lying on my back in my bedroom dreaming about globetrotters and supersonic jets, imagining that in that moment, I could be anywhere. I imagine taking a cruise down the streets of Los Angeles while climbing the Eiffel Tower. And on good days, standing on the London Bridge. But when I was standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking Lake Tekapo, I realise what I had been missing out on, even in my dreams. I realise that before this, my dreams were like the grey sky underneath when you look out of an airplane, which could be anywhere and nowhere all at once.
I stand on the edge of the cliff as still as possible, as though if I really stood still, time could be frozen, burning this moment into memory as a scar on the heart; unwillingly and selfishly refusing to surrender even a second to the past. When I finally step away, I see my shoe prints, an identical pair, pressed into the sand, and I wonder how much wind and weather it would take to wipe them off the face of the cliff.
I wonder if they will still be there if I come back.
I remember we had taken a video recording of this and I watched it again and again, trying to recall the moment right out of the film, even though it was merely dots of flashing lights pieced together in an ever-changing puzzle, a poor second best that serves as reminder of a past experience you once knew. I turned the camera off, pretending that the picture of perfection was suspended in time, that I could reach out and touch it again, even though the tape would reset itself even before I stepped into the car again.
.
A few weeks after, I have another dream. I desperately return to the spot where I had met the gardener, and I am frantic. I search through the grass and the soil, for the words so carelessly abandoned. But the land, it is blank like a piece of fresh slate. Whether it had always been that way or if time had erased what was written, I would never know. I search endlessly for the message scrawled into the sand until I wake up the next morning and forget I ever had the dream by afternoon.