This one was written during some lonely bus rides back in 2018.

It was written for a friend who liked to read my stories during their own bus rides.

It worked out well because it kept us both entertained for a few days.

It was never meant to be a sad story.

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PART 1 

“I don’t want to hear any more about your make believe girlfriend,” Mikey said with exasperation and just a hint of derision. “It’s getting pretty sad to be perfectly honest. 

Owen sighed. He couldn’t expect Mikey to understand. He didn’t really understand what was happening himself. But she wasn’t make believe. She was real and she was out there somewhere. He knew that much. 

It was just the two of them remaining on the bus. Three if you counted the driver. It would remain the two of them until the last stop. It always did. They were a touch under 10 minutes from their stop and so they settled into an easy silence for the remainder of the journey. 

“Same time tomorrow?” Owen asked, as the two of them headed in opposite directions upon disembarking. 

“Same Bat Time. Same Bat Channel,” was Mikey’s response. It was always Mikey’s response and Owen had to bite his tongue so as not to mouth the words along with him. As predictable as Mikey was, he hated to have that predictability brought to his attention. Owen was different. He knew he was predictable and he accepted it. 

Owen had a 15 minute walk ahead of him. He didn’t mind it. He would use the time to remember everything he could about last night’s dream. That was what he did on the 15 minute walk to the bus stop in the morning. 

It was never easy to remember a dream, but these dreams were different. These dreams, the ones that had started about 3 weeks ago, were different. These dreams were about her. 

He wouldn’t even refer to them as dreams. It was one dream, singular. It just so happened that the dream was broken up into parts continued across multiple nights. 

And time wasn’t the same in the dream as it was in waking life. He must have spent over 150 hours dreaming about this girl. The one whom Mikey thought was imaginary but who Owen knew was just waiting for him to find her. 

In the dream no more than 3 hours had passed. The happiest 3 hours if his life. 

Owen was a dreamer but he had his feet on the ground. He knew that he couldn’t go on dreaming about this girl forever. Her existence was beginning to cast a shadow over his every day life, to the point where he thought about little else. She permeated his every waking thought. 

It wasn’t quite dark when he got home but it was after he had taken a quick shower and fixed himself a thoroughly unimaginative meal. He liked the dark because he never felt guilty about putting himself to bed and resuming the slow burn drama series that may or may not have been his overactive imagination. 

His excitement was such that he sometimes found it difficult to get to sleep. A Catch-22 situation that wasn’t likely to draw any sympathy. But a full week’s worth of activities had caught up with him in the end and before he knew it they were together again. 

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PART 2 

The first two or three dreams were a blur. The kind of dreams where you don’t remember any of the specifics, just the way you felt when you woke up. She felt comfortable. More than comfortable, she felt whole. 

She didn’t share the dreams, or the way they left her feeling, with anyone. There didn’t seem to be any point. After all, they were only dreams. 

Only, the dreams continued, night after night, and every one of them felt more real than the last. After a week she had decided that there was something more to these dreams.  That they meant something. Could they be premonitions of something to come? Could they be memories from another life? Did she even believe in the possibility of either of those things? 

As the dreams became clearer, more real, she started to understand what they were about. The story they were telling her. It was the story of her one true love. 

And this made it all the more important to decipher what kind of dreams they were. If they were memories from a previous life, did that mean there were lessons contained within that could they be used to guide her decisions in this life. To ensure that she met this person, her one true love. 

If they were premonitions of something to come, did she even have to do anything? Were they guiding her, instructing her? Or where they just a little teaser of what was in store?  

Perhaps the difference between memory and premonition, between past and future didn’t even matter in this context? Perhaps they were the same thing? A voice from another plane of existence reminding her that she had a soul mate. A person whom she would return to in every new life time. 

But, if they were trying to tell her something, trying to guide her towards this person, why was every dream almost an exact replay of the one before it? What was she missing? 

These were the things she thought about, daydreamt really, as she sat in her small cubicle on the 5^th floor of the non-descript office building she reported to each and every weekday morning. Also, the occasional Saturday. It was what she was thinking about when first her supervisor, then her supervisor’s supervisor, approached her about her declining productivity. 

In fact she was so busy thinking about her dreams and the boy who starred in them that she almost missed the entire dressing down. The only part of the decidedly one-way conversation that she did hear were the words ‘Tilly, were sorry’ and  ‘let you go’. 

The rest of that day was something of a blur. Rather fittingly. All she could think about was how she was going to find this dream boy. If he was, indeed, a real person. 

Matilda didn’t sleep well at all that night. She went to bed much earlier than usual. Partly because she had nothing else to do, partly because she needed to be back in her dreams.  

When she did finally depart for the land of nod she was grateful to find herself in the same position she had found herself each of the previous 7 nights. Only this time, when she came face to face with her dr3am lover she willed herself to stay asleep just that little bit longer. This time she forced herself to speak. This time she made sure to ask his name. 

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Part 3 

Owen Hill passed away on September 24^th 2018. He was 35 years old. The officially listed cause of death was liver failure. Unofficially the doctors were still puzzled as to what had caused his rapid and fatal deterioration. Right up until his final days Owen had been active and healthy. 

Amongst the attendees at Owens funeral were his family, a dozen or so close friends, his work colleagues and a girl named Matilda who had briefly entered his life about 4 months prior. Matilda was accompanied by her husband Shaun. 

Not many of Owens friends and family had met Matilda, but most of them had heard of her. Even the ones who didn’t realise it had heard of her. They didn’t realise because they hadn’t met her and hadn’t even heard her name. But Owen had mentioned  her to most of them, the girl of his dreams. 

Matilda and her husband did not attend the wake, the funeral was all that she could handle. She would say goodbye to Owen in her own way, in her own time. And she knew without a shadow of a doubt that they would meet again. 

Not long after Owen’s death, Matilda’s husband finally asked her to tell him about Owen. It was a subject he had not brooches before. Matilda loved her husband. She appreciated him and cared for him deeply. But she was not in love with him the way she was with the boy from her dreams. 

For these reasons and because she did not want to hurt him in any way, Matilda asked Shaun never to ask her about Owen again. What she did tell him is that Owen meant a great deal to her and that their friendship, because that is all they ever were, had brought her a level of happiness unfamiliar to her. A happiness that would inform the remainder of her days. Shaun accepted this response because her happiness meant everything to him. 

Though he had departed the mortal realm, Owen continued to exist within Mathilda’s dreams for many years after his passing. Some of the scenarios played out in these dreams were from the past, some were from the future and some were without an easily determined time or place. 

Matilda enjoyed the dreams about the future but her favourite dreams were those that took her back to the moments when her and Owen had met. Not within the dreams, but in real life. It had been the happiest of accidents. She was without a job and had no sense if what she wanted to do with her life. He was going through the motions with little to no expectations. 

They had met on the bus. They had immediately recognised one another. She spoke first. He made her laugh. It was love and they knew it. He asked nothing of her but to be near her. They never kissed and they never did anything more than that. Not even in her dreams. Through it all she remained faithful to Shaun whilst Owen, in his own way, remained faithful to her. 

Owen encouraged her to follow her dreams and that is what she did. She went back to school and studied what she wanted to study. She was to become a writer. Matilda’s only regret was that Owen wasn’t around to see her graduate. Wasn’t around to read her first novel. She knew he would have appreciated it. It was about a boy who fell in love with the girl of his dreams and the girl who fell in love with the boy of her dreams.

It was a sad story. But not really.