Selene

It was a bright evening and the cottage was full of people, all of whom I had never met and in whose characters I had no interest. I wasn't interested in anything, for that matter. The time for hope was behind me for good.

Or so I thought.

She saw me lost in my own thoughts and brought me out of the turmoil with a playful greeting. She had short brown hair, greenish-brown eyes with a perpetual smile on them. There was something special—although not remarkable in the traditional sense—about her beauty. She had a beautiful, albeit somewhat skinny body wrapped loosely in the thin fabric of a black summer dress with narrow shoulder straps and a fairly short skirt. Her voice was soothing and comforting.

It's impossible to say for how long we had talked when she invited me to come to her place. I accepted the invitation despite the writing on the wall. It was just too good to be true. I had come with friends, so she gave me a ride in her car. The trip was not long, but I felt drawn to her after every kilometer. Either her voice or her stories cast a spell around me that I couldn't (and wouldn't) shake off.

Her place was colorfully furnished, with artworks of different kinds hanging on the walls and posing on top of every surface. She led me around her spacious, labyrinthine halls as she detailed the origins of the multitude of objects. She explained she came from a family of artists.

I don't know what happened after we passed by the big room with blue wooden walls, as this was precisely the moment I woke up.

Too good to be true.

So real was the memory of the experience, though, that it followed me throughout the day. When I left home to work that morning, I was convinced, despite my natural inclination toward skepticism, that she must exist somewhere. Against all odds I made up my mind to find her.

For the next few days I contented myself with looking for her on the streets. I carefully inspected every face, in a seemingly vain effort to distinguish the oneiric manifestation from the sea of people. Needless to say, it was every bit as unsuccessful as I had imagined.

The following week I equipped my mission with machine-assisted generation and search. First I described her appearance and even her personality to a program able to create high-fidelity imagery. I refrained from using algorithmic guessing to find out her name, even though deriving one from someone's looks would be the most straightforward—and actually accurate—step in this enterprise. I thought the name was sacred.

Then I started to scrape the world in search of a matching face. This turned out more time-consuming than I had expected. I needed to refine the model several times and keep feeding the system with more and more data of real people (something disturbingly easy to get by legally these days). Doing it in my spare time took several days. Many a morning did I wake up to an error message, after collapsing in front of the terminal out of pure exhaustion.

During one of those blackouts she visited me a second time. But now our encounter was not as pleasant. She reprimanded me for what felt to her like stalking. I protested and explained there was no other way to find her. But I was afraid to lose her for good, so I decided to abide by her rules. As a token of her goodwill she threw me a thread.

'When the time is right,' she said almost in a whisper, 'follow the moon.'

She wouldn't say anything else.

I woke up with my face on the desk, sticky with saliva and sweat, an error message impassively blinking on the terminal. A glance at the clock showed me I was late for work. I quickly grabbed my things and left, with the same clothes from the previous day and the same shower from the day before that.

At the office it soon became obvious that no work could be done that day. I was too tired for that. My colleague—and actually the only person I could remotely call a friend—sensitive and smart as she was, immediately noticed my unrest and tried to calm me down with light jokes and work-related rhetorical questions.

But it was no use. I could see her face every time I blinked. And I was blinking a lot. To help me focus I started imagining she was sitting by my side. I used whatever mental power I had left to look busy, but that meant I couldn't give her any attention. She seemed disappointed. To brush off the awkwardness I invited her to have lunch early with me. Then I could give her my full attention. My colleague seemed hurt I didn't invite her, or even tell her where I was going. I felt sorry for her and annoyed for being so selfish, but the truth of the matter is, I couldn't be good company for any real person at that moment.

'Aren't you going to eat?' I asked rhetorically after I ordered my lunch.

'I'm not hungry,' she said, still visibly upset. But then something crossed her mind, or so it seemed from where I stood, and that signature smile lit up her eyes again. She looked exactly as I remembered from the first dream. And when I took notice even the clothes were the same. She looked as beautiful as she did when I first saw her. She started speaking in her captivating way and I didn't see the time go by.

I realized I couldn't possibly attempt to work that day. I paid the restaurant bill and went straight home, bringing her along with me. I fabricated some infirmity and announced my absence to my boss with scarcely any concern for my job security. Nothing felt important to me at that moment. Except for her.

I had barely told her this when I fell asleep on the couch. Deeply asleep. To my misfortune, I didn't see her this time. I woke up to drool on my cheek sometime in the middle of the night. All lights were off, but the room was bright as day, nonetheless. I looked outside; the sky was clear and beautiful. Near the horizon, I saw the full moon, radiating blue flare.

Without a second thought, I got up, grabbed my keys, rushed to the car and drove towards the moon. I felt like Alice, chasing a speedy rabbit. I drove for at least an hour. The buildings were replaced by trees and the landscape became peaceful and soothing.

I continued pursuing the moon, absorbed by my own thoughts, when something crossed the road at high speed as if I hadn't been driving there or couldn't pose any danger. I turned the wheel in the other direction to avoid an accident, only to realize I was driving on the wrong side of the road. This made me turn again in the opposite direction, but I miscalculated and ended up at the edge of the road. This cinematic scene ended as in the movies: my car got stuck in the gravel and I had to step out of it and try to find a solution.

I was in a state of shock, not knowing if I saw an animal, a person, or a ghost. It felt like the latter, but, as mentioned, I'm not superstitious. I started looking around. The moon was still shining, arguably more brightly than when I first saw her through my window back in the city. Not knowing exactly how to proceed, I simply continued my quest. There was a barely distinguishable path on the ground, which I thought could lead me somewhere.

I followed this track for several minutes and barely took notice of how precisely it was still leading me towards the moon. Through the forest she cast a ray of bluish light onto a clearing. There I saw a cottage. My excited, if pragmatic imagination wanted it to be the same wooden building where I first met her. As it was, I couldn't recognize it or even remember the construction from my dream. Whatever the case, I decided to try my luck there and see if someone could help me with my situation.

I knocked on the squeaky old door and waited. No one answered and, at that point, I was too curious to retreat. I turned the handle and, surprisingly enough, the door gave way. In a moment I was inside the cottage of my dream, as I was now eager to believe.

I inspected the moonlit environment with the curiosity of a child, but found nothing remarkable. The walls were built with solid tree trunks and the ceiling and floor were made of long wooden boards. There were two windows facing each other on opposite sides and perpendicular to the entrance. Two long, old-fashioned carpets flanked the windows and pointed the way to two doors, whose interiors were completely dark and inscrutable but presumably led to other rooms, such as a kitchen and bedrooms. I sat on a couch by the window and tried to understand what this situation meant.

I don't know how long I was lost in thought, but the sudden sound of the door opening jolted me awake with terror. Not of ghosts, I should emphasize—but here I was, invading someone's property. Who knows what kind of person could be there in a place like that, at that hour.

'So you did find me!' I heard a familiar voice breaking the silence without a hint of surprise.

'Are you real?' I ventured clumsily.

'Of course!' she replied, this time surprised by my skepticism. 'What do you mean?'

She had the same smile in her eyes that captivated my imagination long after I had woken up from my first dream about her. She also wore the same black silk summer dress with spaghetti straps.

'Well, you have to admit that calling this extraordinary would be an understatement, no?' I continued, mesmerized by her impassiveness.

'Come here,' she said, waving her fingers towards her chest, silently refusing to acknowledge the unlikelihood of the situation.

I slowly stood up and walked in her direction, looking around to test my sanity. She approached me and scrutinized my baffled eyes with a tender, encouraging look. She was even more beautiful than I could remember from the dream. And she was real. I could sense that with my whole body. She grabbed my hands and squeezed them as if to show me that my instincts were right. We looked at each other in the eyes for a long and comforting moment. She came nearer, closed her eyes and opened her lips just a couple of millimeters. I didn't care anymore if this was real or not. I pressed my right hand against the small of her back and pushed her body against mine. She threw her arms around my neck and softly tilted her head backward and slightly sideways. I put my left hand around her nape and directed her lips to mine.

Her soft lips played with mine for several seconds before I finally felt her tongue inspecting the inside of my mouth. It seemed to me that I was experiencing my first kiss: it was pure and sprang out of innocent love. We kissed for several minutes before she pulled herself backwards, grabbed my left hand with her right one and dragged me into the dark rooms. She gently threw me in bed and started undressing herself. Her slim silhouette could be guessed more than seen against the scarce moonlight.

I woke up to the sun stubbornly poking my face with its insolent crown. There was no sign of her, except my conviction that she had been with me just recently. The mobile rang; it was my colleague.

'What the hell are you doing?' she burst unceremoniously.

'What do you mean?' I answered, trying to conceal my alarm.

'I can see you're not really sick nor even at home! Come back to work before you get fired! I can't cover up for you this time.'

'What?' I said tentatively.

'You are still sharing, you idiot!'

What could I possibly be sharing? I was sure I had taken all the measures to cover my tracks. How could they know where I was and, most worryingly, that I was not sick?

'Look,' I started with a shaky voice, 'I can't go back to work right now.'

'Fine,' she conceded at last. 'But don't tell me I didn't warn you. You're on your own now.'

I hung up the phone with a bitter taste in my mouth, not so much out of concern for my workplace, as because of her. Of course, being inadvertently tracked by my employer should raise serious worries, but, for some reason, that absolutely didn't bother me. I felt I had something more important to deal with.

I looked around and noticed that I couldn't tell if it was morning or afternoon. I decided to wait for her inside the cottage, but she never showed up again. I went out for a walk and it struck me that I hadn't eaten since lunch the day before. I rushed to the car to see if I could escape from that surreal situation, but the car was definitely stuck. I found a chocolate bar in the glove compartment, which, I thought, would buy me some time. I went through the privacy settings once more only to conclude, yet again, that there were no trackers. How did they know?

The mobile buzzed. It was a message from my boss telling me not to bother going back to work. Well, even if they would accept me back, could I go? He added that they had started the legal procedures. What could that mean? Can't they just fire me?

At this moment, the sky seemed darker and I had the impression that the sun was lower than when I left the cottage earlier. I unconsciously scanned the firmament looking for the moon. I found its faint silhouette floating somewhere near where it had been the night before. A gust of excitement swept through my body and I instinctively started walking faster. Soon I found myself by the same squeaky door I was now familiar with.

I held the handle for a long time while trying to prepare myself for the worst—that is, an empty house—or to convince myself of the absurdity of my expectations. Nonetheless, however unrealistic my wish, I simply could not brush it aside.

As it turned out, though, I didn't have to. Sure enough, when I finally brought myself to open the door, she was waiting for me on the couch, wearing the same summer dress.

'Where have you been?' I asked in a cracking voice.

'Come on, let's go watch the sunset,' was what came from her mouth instead for a real answer.

Without waiting for my reaction, she took my hand and led me outside, where the sky was already tinted with reds, oranges, and yellows. The pale disk of the moon could now be more easily distinguished in the sky, and I noticed that this was what she was really contemplating, despite the ostensible explanation about the sunset. She leaned her head on my shoulder. I did the same in response, and we observed the full transition of colors and shades that the moon went through until the sun was completely gone beyond the horizon, leaving behind a faint white glow as a backdrop for the forest.

'What is your name?' I asked after our long, complicit silence.

Again she didn't answer, but instead flashed me a surprised look as if she hadn't understood the question. Could I have forgotten it?

She invited me to go back inside. I was assailed by panic and could only bring myself to say one thing:

'Will you disappear again in the morning?'

'Don't be silly,' she replied tenderly. 'Why would I?'

'I don't know, but that's exactly what you did this morning.'

She looked at me with an expression of genuine consternation.

'Are you all right?' she said at last.

I shrugged, pressed her hand tightly, and got up. We went back to the cottage and I spent the most peaceful night of my life with her.