At Night When I Sleep

There is a man in my dreams who wears a salt and pepper beard; his face is tough and worn like leather. He is sitting alone on a large bench, near the corner of a very busy street in Rome, Italy. I’m backpacking, young, and bearded, walking from the central train station with a map in hand, in search of a hostel. I notice him from afar. His face is down, legs crossed, body slouched, and his eyes are closed. He’s wearing green sweat pants, sandals, and a tomato colored polo shirt. I leave the busy foot traffic and move closer to him, pulled, lured for some unknown reason. He’s asleep in a kind of stupor, so much so that I can hear his wild and uneven breathing.

I look at my watch: almost noon. It’s the middle of summer, hot, and humid. Tourists and locals swarm the streets. I look around at all the people, but no one seems to notice this man except for me. As I watch him from just a few feet away, I myself grow increasingly tired, as if caught in a trance. I loosen my backpack in a state of weakness, slide the weight from my shoulders, and drop the pack on the cement. The map then falls through my fingers and lands beside the pack. Sweat slides down my shoulder blades from where the backpack held tight against my frame. My head starts to feel weightless as if suddenly filled with hot air, and my eyes begin to water and blur to shades of black. It’s then that I collapse and fall down on the bench in one fluid, lifeless movement, now sitting, sandwiched, beside this sleeping man. He doesn’t flinch from the collision, never once wakes from his slumber. I can barely fight the weight of my eye lids any longer – like doors they long to shut, but I struggle and look over at him one last time, almost in question.

It’s then that I notice him holding something in his grip: a green long neck with beads of sweat running down the bottle. I lick my lips twice, still fighting to stay awake, and reach for the bottle. I’m sweating from the heat and my hand slips from the glass. I’m exhausted yet I try again, this time managing a good grip, and pry it from his hands. I notice some beer splash out the top from the struggle before my eye lids flop, and everything turns black. I lift the bottle to my mouth in the darkness, half asleep, and empty the ice-cold liquid down my throat. The bottle then slips from my hand, and I hear it shatter on the cement before giving into the trance and falling into a state of unconsciousness.

Much later, in the middle of the night, I awake on the very same park bench, alone, wearing green sweat pants, sandals, and a tomato colored polo shirt. The man is gone, and so are my backpack, map, and the clothes that I was wearing. I get up from the bench in a state of confusion and panic, then hear something crunch under my feet. I look down and find bits of green glass scattered beneath me.