“She Waved at Me”

I suddenly found myself in front of a not-too-tall and not-too-grandiose building. The afternoon sunlight was shining behind it, and I was standing underneath its shadow looking to the street. I was dressed in business attire: a white long-sleeved shirt with its sleeves folded up to my elbows, black straight-cut pants, and black leather shoes.

I could hear at the back of my ear chatters of people coming out of the building; and as they walked past me, I saw that they came out by little groups of two, three, four, and so on and some alone.

They were young men and women about the same age as I, and they too were dressed in business attire. They were identical to me. It seems that they and I have just attended some sort of an event or conference on one of the floors inside the building behind me.

One of them who caught my attention and mattered above all was a beautiful young woman who hailed and rode a public transport right in front of me. She too was dressed smart and looked fabulous. She sat on a vacant seat facing my direction. As she settled herself, the sunlight shone directly at her face and revealed what looked to me one of the unexplored wonders of nature: Her face was very pretty, beautiful, gorgeous, goddess-like, none like other. The soft yellow ray of light illumined and enhanced what was already beautiful in her features.

Mesmerized, I found myself waving my hands in her direction, shyly as if aimlessly shooting an arrow yet as gracefully as I can to say, in effect, goodbye, take care, and have a safe trip home.

With all the little commotion around her, I didn’t expect that she would take notice of my little gesture and of me, of all the dozens of people around me. But apparently she caught sight of the wave of my hand and of me and seemed to have understood my message. She looked at me, waved her beautifully-formed wax-like arms, hands, and fingers as gracefully as she can as if to reciprocate; and she smiled at me with a sweet smile that was enough to complete my day and made everything I may have learned in that conference irrelevant and of no consequence.

She kept this as her vehicle started moving; and I fixed my eyes back at her in return, again waving my hands gracefully and now curling my lips. We were in this for a few but very-precious seconds until the angle of the vehicle no longer made it possible for us to see each other. I noticed that at the last split second, her eyes went from sparkly bright to tear-dimmed.

I then started walking to my right. A few other people including attendees of what I thought to be a conference of some sort also walked with me on that sidewalk. One of them, a young man who was dressed exactly just like me and with the same exact physique as I have suddenly brought out his video camera and started recording footages of me as I walk.

He stepped away from the sidewalk and into the road and bent his body a little as he holds the video camera so as to get a good angle. The young man looks exactly just like me that we might have been taken for twins. He walked sideways as he follows my footsteps to catch a silhouette of me marching one foot after another along the gutter of what looked to be a bridge because there was a waist-high decorative concrete railing on my right side and a body of water beyond, whose little waves are reddened by the light of the near-setting sun.

Normally, I wouldn’t allow anyone to take video of me. But the scene seems to imply that I permitted him. And so he shot away to his heart’s content.

What then lay before me was a blank white unknown. I didn’t see where I was headed because the dream ended there.

So that’s what it was.

by: Marven T. Baldo