Cave des Oubliette, scene 1.

"I dreamt of you, wandering, deserted."

"Have we met?"

"The suffocating task of inspiration. Always striving, pulling from gutters, you scratch on walls creating a world for yourself."

"Is it you?"

She trembles, nodding. Half believing herself to still be in slumber, for so often she has seen that face whilst adrift in her sub-conscious. The hand is real that clutches hers, pulling gently.

"Come with me."

She quietly follows into a dark pub closed from the gray morning light, and slinks into an oaken booth stained in shadows. A dirty washrag draped over a black apron approaches. She doesn't look up.

"Scotch. Neat."

She nods in agreement, assertively this time. They don't speak until the wash rag returns. A bare wrist littered with wiry brown hairs and amateur tatoos faded teal with time drops a tumbler in front of her, which splashes the amber tonic on her wrist. She draws her hand to her parted lips, suckling off the drops.

"How do you know me? What have you seen?"

She looks up from her hand, slowly closes her lips and drops her fingers around the glass without losing eye contact.

"I..."

A sharp inhale whistles down her throat. Her eyes drop as she exhales. The scotch glows in the negligible wake of a tea candle set inside a dusty globe of pocked yellow glass. The light extends just to the edges of the table. Only leaning forward are their faces visible to one another. She takes a tenuous sip and revels for an instant at the sting, the woody fumes rising into her nasal cavity.

"You are lost. Forgotten. Trapped. Is this so?"

"Yes, but... yes."

A tenderness sweeps over her face, softening the furrowed brow that concealed her youth.

"I have dreamt of you. I have seen the labyrinth of your wanderings. The cement walls would be your prison unto death, but you have not ceded your sanity to the gray world. Not yet. You paint the walls with images from your childhood, both from memory and fantasy.

"I have seen your cedars, your rainbows, your faeries, your lions, your chimneys, you leather shoes, your mother. You paint your life as it was, but also as you wanted it be. Every day you create, and yet, as you turn the corner you see only more gray and forget from whence you came. You lose all the effort of your paintings, only to paint again.

"Tell me, from where does this fortitude come? Why do you persist so vociferously?"

The face disappears into shadow as the figure reclines against the tall wooden back of the booth. A large hand emerges from the abyss, wraps around the full glass of scotch opposite and lifts it until it is likewise enveloped. With little delay, the hand returns with an empty glass and as it is laid gently on the table, the face reappears.

With a sincere,handsome smile, he says, "I, also, have dreamt of you."