They say that when you die, you go inside a perpetual dream...
Every sleep is a risk as your soul drifts away to a world apart from your body...
Yet you rise again from the dead, going back to this world...

I saw him... and inside that dream, he loved me...
I thought, maybe I'm dead... Maybe I'll just wake up cold and alone...
Or maybe this love is just a dream...

~~~

She walked the streets. It was an ordinary day-to-day habit, walking to the bus stop and waiting for a bus to arrive.

But that night, there was something extraordinary. It was the start of a dream.

The rain normally makes the night cold. There was nothing extraordinary about it. There were some people waiting in the bus stop. Almost every day, she sees those same people. Maybe that was their schedule. Like her, she was a familiar face in that bus stop every night, at that time.

The rain normally falls down on the city. But it was not a normal rainy night. Maybe each raindrop is a teardrop from the real world that got lost in the world of dreams.

The wind is a normal part of the world. But the wind was suddenly the cause of change, the steel bars of the bridge leading to the world of dreams.

This wind suddenly blew, causing the papers she was holding to fly all over and out of the shelter of the bus stop. They fell on the wet ground and they were slowly soiled. Those papers were all important. Aside from their importance to her work, they were the bridges themselves, leading her to that world of dreams.

"Yabai!" she shouted, going forward under the rain to gather up the soaked pieces of paper. She could still hang them up and dry them when she gets home. But getting soaked was another thing. She was just armed with a jacket that night for the rain was always an unexpected visitor in the city. She tried to save those papers as the more they were exposed to water, the more damaged they could be.

"Douzo," a voice in her ear breathed. She noticed that the raindrops were not falling anymore. Then he looked straight and saw a man carrying an umbrella over her head. His facial features were blurry but she could still make out the large shades and hood that covered his eyes and head. He took her other hand to make her hold the transparent umbrella. She suddenly stopped the moment he held her hand. Everything stopped. The rain dripping down the umbrella seemed to slow down. Time seemed to slow down.

To the bypasser, however, the scene woul have lasted just for ten seconds or so.

The man stood up and ran through the rain. She squinted at his route for a bit until the back of the man wearing that black  hooded jacket faded. She, however, picked up the  two remaining pieces of paper and stood up. She then noticed a red shiny block on the rainy ground. She picked it up. It was a phone. She looked around to see if the man was still around. It was impossible.

He was gone.

Now she wondered, will she meet him again?