The Sleeper, the Path and a cigarette.

This path only exists at night and only in dreams, and then not every night.

 

Tonight it is there, leading as always up into the mountains, over the high pass towards the snow line and though he has never been further he knows that it eventually climbs down to the coast-; a second path leads to the coast from the other side of the mountain, and that too only exists when he sleeps.

 

He is pushing a bike, a bike that existed in hard black metal, along time ago in a city in the far north and his distant youth. It is difficult to say for certain whether the bike was ever his or only borrowed when H chose to agree to lend it; it was never easy. But tonight, here on the path that doesn’t exist but rarely, it’s his own.

 

He is pushing it now as the path has become steeper than he remembers and soon he will reach the snowline where a decision to continue will have to be made. So he stops.

 

In his pocket is a packet of sugar and a mobile phone; his fingers play with the packet of sugar which is short and cylindrical. It feels like a hand rolled cigarette, though the tobacco would be granular and he imagines  taking it , placing it between his lips and lighting it against the cold, his hand cupped around the end blocking the attempt of the wind to prevent it.

 

But he is not a smoker. Even as a young teenager he had never been tempted and now as he struggles towards the high pass he is happy that his lungs remain strong and untouched except by age and hope.

 

Hope has made him catch his breath more than once.

 

Once with H, but there have been others before and since, and there is another catch of breath waiting from him at the end of the invisible line the mobile phone will find before the night has finished and the day has come.

 

If he wakes now none of this will matter, and the path that is, will once again be the path that isn’t, but was.

 

In the night.

 

Where he sleeps.