Lost&Found (freewrite) # 6

The dreams he had of her never quite fit the mold of what dreams are supposed to be, but he'd gotten awfully used to that in the past few weeks. Because she'd guided him, when he'd desperately needed guidance and it was only now, at such a late age, that he considered that perhaps his mother had died for a reason, and not just for the imagined, terrible pain in her head.
He'd thought she'd hit herself on the head, somehow, and lost her balance, killing herself as a result, but now he saw that it all fit some weird, twisted puzzle.
The red haired woman had brought him to this girl, who was now sleeping in his bed, this innocent and he saw it was all for a reason. That he had always been meant to find her and that his mother had always been meant to die, so that he could find her.
'Oh, my darling, I've taken you as far as I can, but I don't know everything. I only know what I'm allowed to know, only hear what they tell me, and you're here now. I wish I could tell you more, but you have to find your way now. All by yourself.'

And suddenly, he is alone in a field, where there are no houses, where there are no voices. No dreams. It was the last time he saw his mother, he thinks, and it strikes him all anew, although he hasn't seen her in over twenty years now, not really. There's something quite awful when somebody tinkers with your dreams, mainly because nothing should be impossible in dreams, yet here he is, and there she is, on the other side, taken from him forever.
And the man wakes, on his couch, and sees he's thrown his covers off, screaming in his sleep and he sees her standing over him. No, it's not her, although she has the same fire-lit here. It's Cherry.
Cherry, whom he saved from the killers and the life of crime.
And she holds him in the night, kissing his forehead, like a mother, although she's still a child herself and she knows that somehow, this is what she's been waiting for all her life, this one man, who stands able to change everything.
'I don't know what I'm doing,' he whispers into her clothes, and it's as if they've known each other for years, as if they were molded together.
He runs a finger over her lips, looking for answers and he tells himself they're there, just so that he can keep touching her face. She's so young, so very young and she's been hurt so much.
He sees strength in this little wild Cherry, strength that he knows he will never posses. He's allowed himself to be weakened for far too long and far too early in his life. He sees it all in the creases of her pink lips – how his mother played into all of this, how her guiding him to her was simply a debt repaid, nothing more.
She's brought him to a strong woman – a girl, he thinks, she's just a girl – like she never was, and because he denied him any strength of his own. And he'd like to tell this to Cherry, for the first time, he wishes he could speak about how broken he was all those years ago, when his mother flung herself out the window, right out of the room he was playing in and how he'd watched as she disappeared into the nothingness and how his little tiny self had been too shocked to cry out, because mothers should know better than to fling themselves out of windows. Clinging to her arms, he tells the story, at least in his mind, and revisits every single detail of her fall, how she hadn't even looked at him, hadn't even spared him one last kiss, so hurried she'd been, so desperately rushed.
In Cherry's arms, the man becomes a boy once more. The boy he never allowed himself to be, and he sheds the tears that his mother deserved. He cries for her and he cries for himself, for the boy he was, for the little boy who would have deserved a mother.
'I'm lost', he tries to tell her, through his tears, and somehow this girl – this stranger – hears him and pulls him even closer.
And her hands reach around him and she pulls his t-shirt over his head, in a desperation that she's never felt before. But she feels it now, she knows it's what is needed now. She must break him out of his prison of tears, or he'll be lost forever and all this will have been for nothing. He allows her to take his clothes off and loves her back in the dance of the tired and lost.
Cherry's hands wrap around his neck and she whispers into him 'You're here, you're here.'

'You're here.'