If You’re But a Dream

His eyes twinkled behind closed eyelids, looking at the speed dial on his dashboard. In his dream, he was still on the road driving at speeds exceeding 180 kmph. “Baby, come on. Let’s go faster” he said, slowly pressing his foot on the pedal. He loved the car. It was his home, his love, an extension of himself. After all, he had picked up the pieces and parts that had been lying scattered and built her from the ground up. It had taken him a considerable amount of time.

There were the best of days; there were the worst of days. On a day she’d purr eagerly at him, he wanted nothing else but to be enveloped in her embrace and drive on forever.

On days of snag, he had wanted to walk it all off. But within a few meters, he’d hear her purr again and walk back into her open arms.

The trips they had gone on together were fresh in his memory. At unexpected moments, he’d have flashes, of images he had seen during the trip. Not scenic images that he had photographed, not postcard pictures that were for sale. Just random images of random frames his mind had captured. A curve in the road that they had hugged together, a lonely tree that stood on a shoulder they had stopped on to catch breath, a house beyond that sudden bump in the road when his hand had gone to the gearshift.

And now here he was with her. In the lap of France where they had wanted to come together. She had already been here before, but all by herself. This was his first time. They were at one of the most prestigious races in the world. The Le Mans 24.

“Will you be able to stand me for 24 hours”, she had asked teasingly.

“Stand? I’ll run with you, all our lives, forget 24 hours!”

Not that he liked cheesy lines, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to throw one at her. A deep purr had emanated in response.

He had turned that purr to a roar as he drove. From the beginning of the race, she had given him a great head start. They had put up one hell of a show. They had set the Mulsanne Straight on fire and danced on the curves much to the envy of the others watching.

He was overwhelmed with joy as she curled into his lap filling him with her warmth, as it started raining. He didn’t mind the rain or the incessant drizzle on his windshield. They were drowned by the sound of the stories she told him. He held her steady, hoping to go all the way through with her.

But he wasn’t the most stable of drivers, or of men. At times, his rage had gotten the better of him, and he had abused her, pushing her limits, driving her beyond the threshold, to realise his errors only when she had demurred, and attempted to apologise.

But perhaps she had had enough. So, pop went a fuse and he had to slow towards the pitstop with a hot engine.

“It’s time for a break. He’ll take over from here”, they said, showing him the suave, younger driver. He protested, in short sputters pike a broken engine. “No, I’m fine. I know her best. She wants me to drive all the way. We're not even halfway through the 24 hours. We still have most of the ride left”.

There would be none of it.

So, he reluctantly closed the door and walked backwards looking at her, to the resting zone, hoping to come back a fresh man.

As she departed from the pitstop, his eyes closed, not wanting to see the taillights. She rode off with her roar growing fainter and fainter.

As he fell into the abyss of sleep, reality morphed itself to suit his dreams. The distant vroom of the cars he heard, was him driving her. The naked bulb by his side was her headlights showing him the road. Nobody had driven her away. She was still with him. She was still his.

All in his dreams.

His eyes twinkled. “Baby, come on. Let’s go faster”, he said with his leg pressing down an imaginary pedal.

Somewhere away from his dreams, Sinatra sang,

“So darling,
If our romance would break up,
I hope I never wake up,
If you are but a dream.”

*Inspired by Ford vs Ferrari and other non-contests.

Time

Sometimes, when we talk to friends from years past, from times where the clock hands touched upon diamond studded digits that reflected the light of laughter that shone off our glistening teeth, the sharp hands of the clock, sensing the moment, move backward, back to those times.

Conversations that once could have been called banal, come back in foggy memories, and yet, are perhaps the brightest and only remnants of days that like lost civilizations are remembered through indecipherable scripts and can never be understood fully, only marveled at.

Perhaps this is why a text or a Whatsapp call consumes more from our data pack than is justified by its length, because it carries in it more than voice. It carries the sight and smells of the world that we once inhabited with the person now on the other side of the line. The "Hello" brings with it the dampness of the corridor of the house, the intake of breath, a reminder of the stairs climbed to meet.

When we reminisce that we were so happy with so less, was it because what we feel as happiness, as contentment and an ability to be satisfied with little, was actually the command and control that were given to us as we were Masters of our own Time?