Never Dreamer

"Who dreams, is awake.

Who sleeps, has to count on nightmares..."

Robert Menasse

Luna stands alone in the train station, only a few small lanterns casting a weak, yellowish light into the darkness of the night. She shivers and pulls her coat around her exhausted body.

The fierce wind blows a strand of hair in her face. Since the day her mother had died, she wore it open, in a silent, but constant, keepsake of her. Diana Lovegood had liked to say that wearing your hair open allowed your thoughts and dreams to flow freely and that it invited new ideas into your head.

She barely notices the hair in her face, neither does she perceive the roaring of the wind sweeping over the snow-covered plain. It pales in comparison to the noise of her thoughts. She seems so calm. It must be the biting air that makes her eyes shimmer softly in the thin moonlight.

At some point she lifts her gaze enough to notice an old bench covered in a mound of snow. Slowly, she walks there and wipes the white, glittering powder from the dark brown surface. For a few moments she stares at it, then suddenly she sinks down on it and takes her knees in the embrace of her arms

.

She squeezes her watery eyes together and furrows her pale brow. She can't bear the memories anymore.

A cry in her mind is cut in the middle as she reopens her lids forcefully. The pain of the needle-sharp snowflakes hitting her sensitive skin becomes fresh again. It drives away the pain of her broken feelings .

She stares unblinkingly into the night, crouching on the bench. Only empty, black desperation remains inside her, matching the winter sky.

Finally a train comes.

As fast as her stiff and cold limbs let her , she runs the few steps to the gate. Full of hope, s he lifts her gaze to the triangle-lights speeding over the snowy plain. The train will take her away.

The blood-red memory of her father, the cruel voices , her hopeless cries as she couldn't help him, the flight away from an enemy she couldn't see... she will leave it all behind. Board the train and it will be gone.

She almost can hear the joyful laughter of the passengers filtering out of the windows with the soft yellow light.

The train is near. Almost here.

But why isn't it slowing down?

She waves her arms to make her presence known, signaling for it to stop. But the train rushes through the station, window-high clouds of snow flanking it like an impenetrable barrier. Then it is past.

No. That can't be. She stands in the whirling snowflakes .

As hope slowly descends within her, desperation wells up like a fountain, bringing the recollections with it. She can't bear to relive them again. She had lost the last barriers to her heart and mind, as He had invaded her head and had raped her most private thoughts. Fiercely, she tries to quell the memories.

Her eyes catch sight of a small, battered sheet of paper on an old notice board. This must be the schedule. She walks towards it. Sure ly there will be other trains. But the ink on the paper has faded. It has nothing to tell. She stretches her hand to smooth down the inward- bent edges. But even under her soft touch the worn fabric crumbles and its pieces are taken up by the wind.

The remnants of the schedule are blown away like a cloud of dirty snowflakes

.

For a long time she looks after them, new tears welling in her eyes. Never to come back...

No one would understand, why, when He had assaulted her dreams, it had been so much worse than if he had raped her body. Not even her friends would know. None of them feels the dreams like she does . For them, she still exists.

She watches her feet as she slowly walks to the rails. Her dark boots leave clean imprints in the wind pressed snow . She walks until she reaches the rails glittering metallic in the moonlight.

What is a dreamer without her dreams?

She waits for a next train. If there will ever be one.

To her surprise there are many. Some fast running, some slow paced. Filled with laughter and joy, hatred, desperation, friendship and love. She can see it all so clearly. Everything, that had once had been her life.

She watches the colorful images go by. None of the trains halts for her.

She had always been separate from her peers, different; nevertheless she had been one of them. But now, she had lost everything, her family, her friends, her life.

And her dreams.

Were it not for her dreams, then maybe a train would stop for her.

The bright snow allows a clear view over the plain to the far away mountains starring like an uneven wall into the night sky. Silhouettes of bare trees emerge from silvery fields, rising like thin, gnarled fingers out of the earth.

Is reality any more than a product of imagination? Because she had refused to conform her sense of reality to the one of her fellows, she had been an outsider...Loony Lovegood.

She had not been crazy, as the others thought ; she had only learned to accept herself as what she was. A dreamer, who will not bow to the realities others set out for her to follow. A dreamer, who has a mind of her own. For whom a dream is as true as reality.

As true as anything ever could be. Her dreams had been hers. Hers alone, her refuge. Her life.

She watches the moon, following almost imperceptibly her path along the sky, casting her silvery milk light on the landscape. Luna, why is your light so cold? Diana, patron of dreamers, why do you distance yourself from me?

Even I, who have only been a daydreamer, have loved you. Why have you abandoned me when I need you most?

I know that I was weak, that He could easily lure his way into my mind. I tried to have faith in you, but...

An especially fierce bout of wind tears her thoughts from her. She welcomes it. If the all-enveloping coldness is the only way to forget, then so be it.

Her gaze caresses the sky. If only she could fly.... Fly away to the stars, the dreaming people. As her mother had told her, when she had taught her about the night and the stars. That every human being's soul had wings. Like angels. If they just let go of their sense of reality, just a little bit, then they can feel their wings , reaching out of their backs. They can stretch them and shake them and fly. When she would be grown up, she could fly away on them, go wherever her dreams wanted her to be. She could even fly to the stars... and join the other dreamers in their dreams.

Of course she can't reach them. She never could. If the realists had been the only ones to think of her as a failure, she could have coped with that. If only she had been a real dreamer. But hers were not the stars and the night. Each minute of sleep was a leaden oblivion, and each morning she awoke, asking herself where all these hours of her life had gone.

Daydreamer. Never Dreamer. Never Again Dreamer.

Slowly she takes her steps. Each of them a new painful effort.

She lies down on the crisp snow blanket. The wind is but a soft whisper in her ears, chasing a few crystalline snowflakes.

Like a sluggish turtle the cold creeps through her mantle, through her skin into her very bones. She watches the constellations on the night sky. They pale when the moon passes them.

As the memory what has brought her here diminishes.

She shivers as her body tries to warm itself. This stops soon, but she only concentrates on the wings of her soul.

Beautiful rainbow colored wings, and so many black and burnt spots. She tries to heal them. To fly. She wants to join the stars, the dreamers, for once in her life.

Before the morning breaks, the moon vanishes, and it gets darker still. The torches flicker and die out.

She lies in the snow, the whispering wind and her resounding heartbeat her only companions.

She concentrates on her wings, her gaze fixed on the stars.

The gray train-station rises still into the night.

Her vanishing footprints the only marks of presence.

The last train gone.

The lights died out.

Her cold lids don't move any more as she tries to close them. So in the dark hour before dawn she only sees the stars.

In the morning, as the sun gently touches the horizon and golden rays of beauty caress the landscape, a bright red train stops at the station, steaming his gray clouds into the clear sky.