only in dreams
the night brings him back to me, unwanted
I’ve been dreaming about him a lot. He’s in the room with me and we’re still together but he’s not talking to me. Or, we’re in a car, driving upstate, but he’s not talking to me. He never talks to me. He glances at me sometimes, as if he’s taking stock of what and who I am. I don’t want him in my dreams. I don’t ask for him to be there. But he arrives almost every night now, silently judging me, invading my space.
I wake up thinking of him, then. I can’t say if they are good or bad thoughts; they are just remnants of the dream, frayed ends of what’s left of us, together and apart. I wonder what he’s doing. I wonder how he’s doing. I don’t think about these things because I care, I tell myself. It’s sort of a morbid curiosity, thinking about something that is dead and buried. Maybe I want him to be doing ok. Maybe I don’t. It’s some of this, some of that.
It’s been four months since our last contact, just a flurry of text messages when I was in the hospital. “I’ll check in on you tomorrow,” he texts, and then disappears again, the ghost of all that died. That was July. It’s the end of November now. Winter is coming, darkness seeps into everything. I move him off my pinned contacts on my phone. I let his last text to me get lost in time, just another message between Doordash and Bernie and all the other people who did not get pinned. I forget about him, mostly, until the dreams come for me.
He’s wearing what I last saw him in; the black Dickies, the Converse hightops, the red Hawaiian shirt, black sweatshirt zipped halfway up. That’s when he sat on the couch and told me he was leaving. But in my dream he’s in our old kitchen, at the old house where the demons were born, and he’s drinking a Miller Lite. I ask him, didn’t you quit drinking? He doesn’t answer, he just turns away from me. I leave the room and thus, the dream.
I lie awake in bed at 3:29am, trying to analyze the dream. Why does he remain silent? Why is he always there, looming, judging, hulking over me aggressively? Maybe I’m supposed to say things to him, all the words I meant to say on the couch that day but that got caught in my throat when he stood up to leave. I should tell him I feel abandoned, I feel cheated, I am angry. I should tell him he owes me an explanation and an apology, but if I can be honest here, I don’t want either.
I shouldn’t be thinking of him this much, almost two years later. I should be over it. I should be past it. But it’s not that easy, and some days are harder than others. I go days without thinking of him until I clean out my office desk and find a small, framed picture of the two of us, smiling at each other as if we were too stupid to realize there was no way you’d stay forever.
I get out of bed. It’s only 4am, but I don’t want to risk falling into another dream about him, so I get up and make coffee and stare at my up-too-early Christmas tree and think about the fourteen Christmases we had together and chastise myself for thinking of him at all. I can’t help where my brain goes while I’m sleeping but I can control my thoughts while awake so I start thinking about an English muffin with goat cheese and blueberry jam so I get up and make and English muffin with goat cheese and blueberry jam. I make another cup of coffee because I do not want to fall back asleep and dream again. I know he’ll be there. He’ll be wearing the Dickies and giving me that look and I will say nothing the way I always do. The way I always did.