Mo mhuirnín,

I don’t dream of you often, just once every six months or so, once a year probably. And why I would dream of you now, an entire ocean away, I don’t know.  The early, restless light slipping through yellow curtains keeps me from drifting back to sleep after I wake up, tangled in the sheets and confused, not sure whether you are here with me, whether I’m awake. I’d thought I felt your thumb brush lightly, drowsily, across my lips once, your breath light against the nape of my neck, your palm splayed across my hip.  When I curl my fingers into your black hair, stark against the white sheets even before dawn, I am in an eternal argument with myself, suspended between competing desires, to kiss your eyelids and smooth your hair from your face, or to gather your hair at the roots and pull almost as hard as I can, exposing your throat and making your green eyes flash awake. I do neither, this time, but I’m distantly aware that more and more often, I do not act on my desires.  I’m slowly being taught that I simply do not get what I want anymore, and the fear of losing you, the you I don’t even have, is so real and so sharp even now that I prefer to lie sleepless and still beside you, wanting and wanting but never moving or touching, suffocating for hours on my own shallow breath and my own pathetic desire. I can’t figure out how you got here; I can’t be sure which one of us was crying silently before the sun came up, in the throes of another bad dream; I can’t make sense of any of it, but I don’t care, because I had been so afraid I would never touch you again.  What I really want I can’t have anyway, not even in my dreams.  This strange ache, this ghost-visitation, these dream-tears, are all I can have, so I am willing to sit silently and make of my entire being a raw surface waiting to be wounded.

The bad dreams we hold each other through are, this morning, dreams within dreams, it turns out.  I finally let go and open my eyes, give up on the liminal state I’d been suspended in. I don’t know why, ever, and i certainly don’t know why now.  I do know that i blame you for the chasm that’s left when you tear us apart, even when my brain has brought you here in dreamspace only.  When you enter the room, something thick, invisible, but almost tangible grows between us, through the air, some sort of electric current that is still somehow organic, some surge that I both welcome and dread, even after all this time. I welcome it because it makes me wonder if I was even alive before you came into the room.   I dread it because I never forget what it feels like when you leave, like something is being pulled out of me by the roots.  A dream-memory of the plane of your cheek under my fingertips, my thumb not quite rough against your lower lip, your body not quite awake as I ghost my traitorous fingers along the curve of your thigh  – these are my souvenirs, this time.   Mine’s so light a touch as to seem impossible; my hand should burn your skin if skin could tell the truth.  You make me afraid of the violence of my own want for you, of feeling that I have to tear you, to make you hurt, so that you can feel what I feel when you touch me.  So I am simply afraid to touch, because it never seems enough, because I think i cannot be trusted.  I have never forgiven you for it.  I suppose I never will.

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Live – Heropsychodreamer