Oh, there is a difference, alright, between being wide awake and just awakened, just as there is a difference between falling for her and liking her. Perhaps a dream is truer than most would love to yield, or perhaps there is no such thing as a dream and there are only different places with more that just miles between them. I know there is a place were I can go when I feel saddened, it became mine a long ago, since I happened to learn the difference between falling for her and liking her, and I am sure that I was wide awake, never sleeping, when I learnt it. Of course, I can never actually be wide awake in that place anymore, but, perhaps, that is the difference of being just awakened.

The sand, though, feels harsh, like little blades all over my face, and I can smell the same air I smelt so long ago, at a certain time, at a certain place where I met her, and the certain place where I left her. Is it called leaving, though, when we both leave? I left her, but she also left me, perhaps unwillingly, but she did, and so did I, and something within me tells me that there is also a difference between leaving someone and parting with somebody. I still feel my blade beside me, and I carried not any shield to lose this time. Would I happen to dream that yet again she kneels besides me, trying to wake me?

But, island though it is, I feel a bit of cold about me, and the water is not warm anymore. Noon, perhaps. I must get up.

Lo! There it is! But it is there no more, the egg, the palace, its resting place. I see an empty nest were there once lay its bed, this island's very being, I see the summit. I once climbed the mountain, full of foul creatures and flowing streams, and beheld the sea from atop. I remember the fear of returning to it, I remember it so well because I knew that in the end what I would do would put an end to all, to the village, to the wood, to the swamp, to the very mountain and, surely, to her. I wept out of joy when I saw that it had not been so.

I hear a voice, a singing voice, and after my heart has calmed down from beating like a drum and I have yielded to knowing that I am a fool beyond healing, I turn to see whose fair song it is. There is a woman, sitting on a rock, singing a beautiful song, but I see that the likeness I had seen in her at first has come chiefly from my own mind, like a ghost that fell out of it and into her body and voice, as if my own eyes had her like the light out of a lamp. It almost hurts me, and, cursed be myself, my eyes become misty at the sight.

As I walk up to her, I hear more clearly what she sings, and I think, almost smiling, that perhaps she is not wrong at all:

And you will find while in the wind

Something that you lost

The dream was never over

The dream was only lost