Ketonet Pasim

כ"ד כסלו תשס"ט
Shamash 25

Last night I dreamt. I was The Observer.

They were soul mates, yet there was some issue between them which held him back. He would not walk beside her any further down the narrow private path she was walking through the woods in the afternoon light.

Facing one another, they spoke words I could not hear, but nevertheless it was clear that she was going to go forward and he was going to go back. This path of hers had been forbidden to him by the culture from which he came. He had to make a choice, to walk beside her and continue on through the woods to the protected village or to leave her and go back. He stood still as she turned and began to continue her walk down the path toward the village.

He painfully watched her beautiful form walk away, quickly calling out to her to come back. Yet he refused to go forward toward her. She stopped, turned and tore open her blouse to him in a painful gesture of goodbye. Then, she turned and continued walking down the narrow path through the woods to the village.

The scene changed, he was back in a dark place, regretting his decision to return there. On a dark rainy night, a car stopped on the road to pick him up as he walked to find his way back to the path he had left her on. As the driver of the vehicle opened the car door for him, the driver had a gun and was going to kill him, but the man wrestled the gun from the homicidal driver and killed him. Then an officer pulled up with a shotgun and also attempted to kill the man, but the man pulled the driver's revolver from between the car's seat cushions and shot the homicidal officer through the side of his head, killing him. As the homicidal officer was dying, he said the most hurtful thing he could think of to the man - "this night as we speak someone is going to take the body of your wife", (meaning that someone was going to rape and kill her). Of course, I knew the officer was lying (the murderer had not been able to find her as arranged) and was saying that just to hurt the man with his last dying breath, but the man believed the officer and was anguished.

The scene changed - the two were now together in the village. Apparently, the man had found a way to shorten his travel down the path she had been walking, he had shortened it, walked it and made his way to the protected village where she was.

They were now walking a public road lined with houses together. The feeling of mortality was thick in the air. Time was short in this life and they had not yet been together. If not now, there may never come another time. They both entered one of the houses at the side of the road to lay together. A woman who had been staying in the house ran out.

I woke up.