A Daffodil Memoir (part two)

    Nights flew by as steam rising from a tea kettle peacefully dancing upon the cold air of winter. Watering our lives with fantasy and romance. We simply had to sit back in our old seats and watch it grow. Young hearts in vintage surroundings, splashing the youth of our souls across the walls as vivid oil painters in their prime, lost in their minds.
    I could see them in my sleep. The painters. Dancing across fields of white in robes of golden trimmed ivory that flew behind them in ecstasy. Eyes of the Gods watched the painters imagine a world under their fingertips with only tiny stones of obsidian. Tossing the snowflake spattered stones from an enchanted pouch which seemed to hold endless amounts. The ancient material would then burst into a thousand colors on contact with the white world, creating animals, voices, plants, life, and death. Pain and love, suffering and pleasure. Painters created the world. As so in my dreams.
    I could not find time to dream that night, though.
    Anna and I were home alone, Laughing with the warm flames frolicking in the wood stove. Leo had gone to town to buy some ingredients I needed for the breakfast I insisted on making the next morning. He never liked watching me cook or work for him, even though it was my pleasure. It took me the force of a hundred bulls to get him to let me even lift a finger after the birth of our child. In a way I appreciate this, but if a man doesn't let you feel needed, what's the point? As most women, I needed to be needed.
    And the fire dimmed. Anna drifted into the dreamland I resisted that night, on my chest. moving slightly, twitching with the movements of her dreams. The moonlight shown through the window hit the floor like a statue of glass shattering in slow motion upon thin ice. Then sinking to the bottom of a blue ocean of non-existent life.
    Silence came over the house. No more crackling, no more laughing.
    I curled up into a ball, resting Anna close to my breast. I felt as though a tadpole, in an ocean of whales. watching the moon. watching me. Floating away.

    The daffodils bloomed with a yellow glowing light. Stretching vastly across the open plains. I stood in delight, arms outstretched, spinning softly to the sound of melodic voices. The flowers sand to me, their yellow mouths opening as if in a fairytale. Their green eyes were tiny, but piercing, blinking wildly over the field. I ran uncontrollably Through the daffodils, magically not breaking a single petal, nor tearing a single stem.
    I reached a glass wall. at least a hundred feet tall, and endlessly wide. My hands caressed the invisible barrier while my feet ran beside it. The daffodils laughed, as my mind cried. I stopped to catch my breath. Watching the world on the other side of the glass burst into flame. And the daffodils still laughed. They danced and moved with the wind, flashing their green eyes, as they danced above the ground. Pulling themselves from the ground in one large mass. I could only stand and watch in amazement, while the flowers of my dreams flew over the wall and into the fire. I screamed for their return. But they refused to listen.

    He never came home that night. The cotton sheets caressed my body as I lay sky clad in our bed, awaiting his return. I wanted him that night, as I wanted him every night. His delicate warm touch, his comforting words that seemed to polish me like a stone in the sea.
    I rolled to my side facing the empty cold blankets that lay vacant in front of me. Gently,  I stroked my hand across the blankets, as though petting a frightened deer. Smelling slightly his succulent scent that sang its way into my soul from the first time I saw his face dancing in the leaves. The eyes that penetrated me so those couple years ago, were not looking back at me. This moment, my love was gone.
    Locking into safety, I pulled the blankets closer.