“That place…I know it…”
Half sleep, half words and utterances, and mouthed while Toni’s eyes flickered behind lids now closed to the perfumed darkness of the night.
“Yes, that place…those people…I know them still…”
And Toni woke with a start, lifted his mind from the dream and put it where it belonged, and it belonged here, in a town in the north of Italy on a warm and windless evening in mid May. The sun had burned from dawn to dusk branding its heat into the bricks of the garden wall, the paving stones and the table, and upon it wandered hither and thither a ball of paper on a breeze. He blinked, put out his hand and grabbed the paper before it rolled off the table and away.
No, not this waking world, not now...it’s not over yet…
Closing his eyes, he rested his chin in the palm of his hand and he licked his lips, tried to find a way back into the contentment of the dream…
…and the happy feeling, the happy place I knew…the happy person I was…
The evening breeze carried the same warmth as that of the day, but now the moon was shining in a darker shade of blue, and Venus was posturing in her own sky, inviting her audience to admire and enjoy her presence along with the conjured-up memories of moments from other warm evenings in this place, of times past and friends past and rambling on about this and that, and this and that were interrupted by a dream or two of futures emerging in a haze of night perfume. And that notable evening had occurred 35 years before when they had all been together for the first and last time, his brother and his girlfriend, he and her and she and him and his mother and father and on this very terrace in the sun, and the day had been as warm then as it was warm now and the evening air full of the scent of flowers and faraway rumbles of thunder.
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