The visit

In my dream, I was watching a boy who, sitting on a stool at the kitchen table, silently and obediently nodded to every of this mother’s warnings, perhaps scolding or simply instructing him. He is a handsome boy of big dark eyes on a pale face and lank brown hair. Carefully he listens to his mother and, after each of her sentences, nods as a sign of understanding.
I witness the scene from very close, but — both knowing I am there, none of them seems to notice me, attentive to each other as they are; though in the bottom of his stare the boy has as if an absent air, like that of one who lives on two worlds at once: the inner and the outer. I gaze at him with a mixture of sympathy and infinte tenderness, and as lovingly as I’m able to: his childlike countenance, so familiar and so alien at the same time, and his deep, clever eyes that seem home to misterious thoughts, though perhaps they just reflect a most candid innocence.
I was feeling a great love for him and, mostly, an enormous pity: pity because all the sufferings he would have to undergone in life, pity that his tender and pure soul would age too early. Then, I came close to him and, taking his head between my hands, put my lips to his cheek and kissed him warmly, with the emotion of that who’s saying farewell forever — kissed him like my aunts in the village did when, by the end of every summer, we returned to the city. And the boy, still attentively listening to his mother’s words, received my kiss without a stare, neither of affection nor aloofness; not indifferently, but simply as if… as if he had not been kissed at all.
That boy — whom I was visiting thanks to the magic of dreams, that boy was myself.
And when I woke up, and the spell was gone, for a while I kept asking to myself, trying to remember: did I ever feel, as a child, the warmth on my cheek of a ghostly kiss?, did I ever shiver, being a boy, with the close breath of an invisible presence?, did I ever get the impression that someone was visiting me from beyond time?