Dream - Vault Valentine

I walked as a ghost through your life.  A strange thing with empty thoughts, passing through corridors of perhaps and maybe.  Equally on both hands, the possibility of what was and could have been.  I saw the friends, the trials, the mundane and the lovers.  I felt little, for we were but passing friends as children, I had no investiture in what you were or what you were becoming.

It was a casual kind of interest, a curiosity without caring.  Moving through places I'd never been before, how our lives had diverged!  What to say though, should ever we meet, what could I possibly comment on or think to mention.  But silence as we passed, strangers to one another on the train.

Am I so different?

Are you?

I came upon a place I'd never been, passing through walls.  It was dark and smelled of old cardboard, dusty and damp, faded around the edges.  I poked at a few boxes, walked across the concrete and thought what might have brought me here when I came upon a sealed case.  Sharp iron edges adorned it, and a heavy steel ring of numbers on the front.  Curiosity warred within me, and experimentally I spun the dial.  Two clicks to my ear where I should have heard four.

I ran my fingers over the cold metal, and then on an impulse lifted the heavy thing up and on its back.  There taped to the bottom, a faded brown piece of paper with the numbers scrawled in your handwriting.  With a casual twist, the safe opens and inside are shoeboxes filled with paper.  Statements, forms, invoices, information.  Uninteresting, a canvas of normality to life.  Tucked away in the back, a small plastic bag with a handful of scraps in it.

I pause then, without knowing why.

A tiny, faded little red piece of paper.  My handwriting there, and a little glittering sticker.

The memory is elusive, I cannot remember making it, but it sits here alone in your world.

I shut the safe, and vanish though shadows into waking.