Dreams

They come from a swirling mixture of the day's events, thoughts that are being ruminated over and those things that ever secretive portion of the mind has filed away. They come in ultra color vision or those faded, washed out tints I see in photos that have spent too much time exposed to the sun.

He is a transient visitor during my waking hours. As time has passed he has slowly receded. Certain sights and smells trigger memories, but he does not consume me now the way he did most of my life. The sun I revolved around, singed by the heat and radiation. Him, patiently waiting when I could take no more. Again and again I was torn by the gravitational pull, struggling against myself, but always going back.

He has not taken a breath in years. Not a single knowing smile or a look that peeled me away to the core. He is dispersed, having washed up on the stream banks and made his way into a river that flows north.

In the daylight I go about my life. I cannot change what has happened. I cannot bring him back. The years have given me distance from the breathless grief, the things that should have been said, the things I can never take back. It took so long, but time is a salve I gratefully accept. He is not in the forefront of my brain. I tightly close the door when he wells up. I rarely speak his name.

Yet he has slipped quietly into the nightly subconscious pool.

I rejoice in the nights when my mind is a blank slate, or I simply cannot remember what tale my brain was developing. He is there in the dream scape, sometimes nightly, sometimes not for months. Sometimes the main character in the nightly yarn my brain spins, sometimes standing silently in the background. But when I wake it's always the same, even after all these years. For a brief second there is hope when I open my eyes and I have to remind myself he's dead. Thousands of times going through this. I used to sob early on, but now I bitterly get up and push him into a dark, cramped corner of my mind so I can get on with the day. Wanting to dig out with a garden trowl last vestiges of what my mind cannot let go of.

I used to bargain early on. Bargain away my arm, bargaining away anything and everything I had of consequence. But he never came back. And now I would give anything not to dream.