It was a particularly cold November evening, I recollect. It had rained the previous day, and the nostalgic petrichor still lingered in the damp air. Though my feet tapped eagerly at the floor, longing for that wonderful feeling of adventure, the mere thought of leaving the comfort of my couch displeased me. I suspected I’d caught some sort of fever during one of my expeditions, though I only inferred that possibility from the uncharacteristic urge that ordered me to keep watching the crackling fire.

With each thrilling draft that crept through the window and yet somehow failed to seduce my eyes away from the hearth, the feeling that something was wrong grew vivider. I failed to recall the last time my boots were empty for this long. In fact, I was starting to realize how little I knew about my house. Had the light always flickered like that? Had the sink always been in that corner? Since when had the floorboards creaked so subtly under my feet?

Soon I realized, however, that those were not my feet. When his voice wafted into my ears, my spine rattled.

“Good evening, pilot.”

I set the mug of coffee on the table and rose up, my legs quivering under the sudden weight they had to hold. The speaker was a young man, perhaps in his early twenties, with black hair and olive eyes. He was dressed semi-formally, like a person at work. His lips were curved into a faint smile, and the way he held his hands behind his back evinced to me that he was not real; no person would exhibit such decorum at an uncared for home like mine. Still though, mayhap out of sheer boredom or tempestuous loneliness, I felt inclined to pretend that this figure was not part of my desperate fancy, and so I feigned an air of discomfort.

“Who the hell are you?” I muttered.

The man curled his lips further. “I know what I’m not,” he replied. “Your imagination.”

I sniggered. Clearly, this figure originated from a part of my mind that knew very little about the rest. “‘Course you are. You can’t prove that you’re real, can you?”

“No, but you can’t prove that I’m not real, either.”

I paused briefly to contemplate my subconscious’s clever conundrum, but I quickly regained my senses—I was not going to let him win. “You know I’m not a pilot, right?”

“No? Pity, you always wanted to be one.”

“How’d you know?”

The man slowly turned around and headed for the kitchen. I followed him and watched as he poured himself a cup of coffee from the moka pot. “I’m not sure who I am, sir, but I must have stemmed from your earliest memories. The dream of becoming a pilot was traded for that love of roaming when you were eleven years old.”

As he placed the cup in the microwave and turned it on, I dwelled on the past. Memories from that period of time were always hazy—there weren’t many major events I could remember from my prepubescence. “Why did the dream disappear?”

“I know nothing more than you do, sir. I’m just more comfortable laying out the facts.”

The microwave beeped as its gentle hum ended. The man took out the cup and mixed some milk into it, then took a long sip from the solution. “Ah, that’s the stuff.” He scratched his head and turned to look at me. “You know what the fact that I’m here means, right?”

“Aye, I feared you’d ask that,” I sighed. “I’m not imagining you. I’m hallucinating.”

He nodded solemnly, dipping his mouth in the coffee again. “And what does that presuppose?”

“That I’m… I’m, er… I’ve been drugged?”

He cackled. “No. That’s not it.”

“Then, uh… Th-there must be a gas leak somewhere. Or maybe this is all just a very vivid dream! Hey, look, it just turned lucid! How ‘bout that?”

The man shook his head sadly. The next words he said, I feared most:

“You’re losing your mind, sir.”

I stared at him for some time, watching as he lifted the coffee back to his lips, which quivered in an obvious attempt to suppress a grin. I ground my teeth but kept level, sticking to reason. “That’s impossible. I’m as healthy as a horse and as young as a foal. My sanity has no reason to waver.”

“Doesn’t matter. Lunacy is, in a way, akin to cancer—you can lower the chance to develop it, but you can’t prevent it.”

I noticed that my fists were clenched tightly, and that they shook a bit from either anger or fear, but I had to keep level, I had to, I had to, I—

“YOU LIE!”

I snatched the cup from his fingers and threw it against the wall, where it shattered into a thousand pieces.

The man remained calm, but the quivering of his lips was ever so apparent. “I’m afraid not.”

“BULLSHIT! All of it! I’m not crazy! Not even a bit!”

“Sir—”

“My mind is okay. I am okay. Get the hell out of my house.”

He said nothing, but his lips still quivered. The sight made my eyes twitch. He sighed and rose from his seat before ambling to the door calmly. I opened it for him, wishing this demon would leave me as soon as possible. He exchanged an amused though sorrowful look with me. “You could still become a pilot, you know.”

“Leave.”

He nodded briskly and hurried out. I slammed the door shut behind him and turned the lock, sealing all that troubled me on the other side. Befuddled by the sudden surge of anger and frustration, I staggered back to my lovely couch and sank into the velvet.

There. No more of that crazy man. No more dreams of being a pilot. No more thinking about the past. None of that moonshine had any place here in my placid abode.

And yet, as I sat gazing at the dancing flames and the shadows that the iron grate cast on the floor… a wave of sentiment crept into my heart. I closed my eyes and thought back to that old dream of mine. The dream of walking into an aircraft, of watching the ground beneath me grow smaller and smaller, of seeing magnificent mountains and cities zoom by. Whatever happened to that dream?

Curious, isn’t it? The appetite for fulfilling dreams turns ever so strong just as they become unfulfillable. Now that I knew I was crazy, I could never be a pilot. It’s such a pity.

I was thirty years old when that sable-haired man visited me, and as the years flew by and the melancholy merged with powerlessness to form a vicious cycle of inactivity, I slowly realized that he was right. I could still have become a pilot. Coincidentally, it was on another cold November night, many years later, that I laughed at my past self for letting such a trivial thing as mental illness get in the way of my dreams. Further years of regret and longing passed by before I realized that I was still letting trivial things get in my way. What’s there to regret when things can still be done?

I’m sixty-five years old today. Tomorrow, I’m going to fly over that old house of mine for the first time in my life, and nothing will be there to stop me. Not age, not insanity, not melancholy; nothing. At last, I am free.