I Married the Face From a Decade of Dreams

There was a face in my dreams that belonged to nobody. It started when I was about seventeen: not romantic dreams, mostly mundane ones — queues, classrooms, train platforms — into which the same young man would wander. Sandy hair, a chipped front tooth, a way of frowning while smiling. Over the years he aged, which unsettled me most when I finally noticed it. My dream extras never aged. He did.

The recurring scenery was a blue door with a brass knocker shaped like a bee. Sometimes he stood in front of it; sometimes it was just the door alone. I sketched it once in a diary when I was twenty-three, bee and all, because a dream where he silently handed me keys had felt oddly ceremonial.

At thirty-one my flatmate and I were hunting for a cheaper place. Third viewing of the day, a shared terrace house, and I was checking my phone on the pavement when my flatmate said 'this one has character.' I looked up at a blue door with a brass bee knocker, and the pavement did a slow quarter-turn under me.

The current tenant showing the room opened the door. Sandy hair. The chip in the tooth. The frown folded into the smile. He said 'you found it okay?' and I said something that was not language.

I did not tell him for four months, until it was clear we were becoming something, and then I showed him the diary sketch, dated eight years earlier, expecting a polite retreat. Instead he went quiet and produced his own: a note he had typed after a vivid dream in university about 'the girl on the platform who kept missing the train.' The physical description was me, down to the scar through my eyebrow.

We married two years later. The knocker came with us to the new house. Neither of us can explain a single part of this, and we have stopped needing to.