Pursuit of Standing Still

For no less than a thousand nights I have sought my prey. I sense I am close to him, but alas! I never can grab hold of his cloak; he sits near and mocks me just out of reach, as if he were no more than a crude court jester of old, or he fully slips away, and the night is miserable. Fortune and fate betray me eternally. My nights are occupied solely with the search, but my days distract me with other (altogether less important) matters – that I could but devote my whole being to the pursuit!
One evening particularly stands out, for it was on that dreary moonlit night that my prey first slipped from my clutches. There was a time, oh, yes, there was a time when I could lay claim to this prey; when he stayed near of his own volition; when I enjoyed his company as I enjoyed no-one's. We remained apart, and ignorant of each other, until late in the evening, when surreptition overtook my mind, and I invited my dinner-guests and my compatriots to go back to their own homes. When all the outsiders (who could, of course, never know of the secret game) had departed, I would find him, growing nearer to my body and my soul, crouched beneath my eyelids and dragging them down – you need not believe me to imagine what a sensation that is, to have someone tugging on your own eyelids! He came close, and closer, and closer still, and (it never failed) upon entry into my pajamas and my cozy four-poster bed, we would merge into a single being. At this point I would have the very strangest hallucinations, some important, some droll, some wholly unrelated to anything I had experienced, some dredging up ancient locked-away memories. And then, all too soon, my friend would gather up his things and withdraw forthwith back to the shadowy realm from whence he had come.
But I mention the one evening as important, and have devoted too much of your time to my history. Nay – the history is of the utmost importance – surely you understand how wonderful it was, for us both! But my friend must have decided opposingly, and one night in April, just after the first of the great rains of the year, when the frogs wrought their lust against humanity's ears and the mosquitos found their own fair-skinned prey, when the clouds just began to cleave and the Moon began to show through, he did not come to me. Presently I rose from my chair, my guests having departed, and I went in vain search of him; in naïveté, I called for him; I missed my dearest friend, who was nowhere to be found! And in fact, he did not join me that night, nor the next, nor the next; and I determined on this third night that I must track him to the very ends of the planet, if I were to reattain him and appraise his motives.
This brings us to the present. He is near, in these dank woods he is near; I can sense his heavy perfume, his impossible aura of wear and exhaustion. He must be nearer than I had thought, as I feel my eyelids growing leaded on their own – surely a positive sign of his proximity! I am alarmed at how close we were to one another, but also pleased, as it shows just how intertwined and inextricable our fates remain. I hear a branch cracking underfoot ahead of me – aha! There he must be – I dash forth, pulling out my bejeweled dagger of more ancient days – and there he is, no longer running, crouched at the riven roots of a dead elm tree.
Before I can slash my dagger across his chest, before I can say a word of his betrayal to him, he does the most astonishing thing – he leaps at me and joins with me, his hands outstretched as if to clench my beating heart! I am fearful, but the last thing I see are his eyes, sullen and regretful, and my mind is eased just so by this, as he is surely making amends in his own way.
And while I can think, and remember, and tell you this story – to this day he and I are together – no Sun or sound or daystruck adventurer can rift us – he and I will dream together, forevermore!