I woke up feeling like the ghost that wears this fleshy mascot I call a body phased out for a smoke break. A hollowness growled in my bones like the desperate pleas of a barren stomach. I pulled the covers over my head and did everything I could to sink back into the same warm embrace of the subconscious quicksand that had just spat me out like I was just another morning loogie indifferently splattered against the cold cement of the waking world.
All attempts at returning to the hot tub club remained futile. As we all know, when it comes to dreams, the sign on the outside of the door couldn’t be more clear:
NO RE-ENTRY
There isn’t a handle to yank, a window to break, or a bouncer to bribe. One moment you’re inside experiencing something as convincingly real as the device you’re staring at in this very moment, the next you’re on the street looking back as it all fades into the ether like it was never there.
That morning was no different. One moment I felt more content, loved, and at peace than I ever had before, the next I was alone in my bed trying to reconcile with reality.
I consolidated the few scraps of energy I had floating around inside my skin and got out of bed. Out of habit, I grabbed my notebook and scribbled a page or two in an attempt to articulate why I was feeling how I was. When I was done, I put my pen down and sat in silence for a moment.
Then, I sent a text.
…
At the time this text was sent, I wasn’t thinking about the partner I currently had, or what kind of response I was or wasn’t going to get from the recipient, I was only thinking about my gut. I was only thinking about the hunger pangs of an unsatiated soul.
For the entire decade up until this point, I’d had countless mornings like this. I would dream of a fleeting conversation, or waking up just as my heart stopped after seeing her across a room at a party, or just a headful of curls walking away from me through an impassable crowd of blurry faces. It was always some variation of one of these, and every time I would wake up with a pit in my stomach and a cloud hanging over my bed. But after ten years of this, I had gotten used to living with the weight of my past hanging around my neck.
When she moved across the country, I followed her. It was there I carelessly drove a knife into her back while in staggering horror she watched my sheep’s mask slip. Her heart wasn’t merely cracked crystal, it was shattered glass. And like a heedless child, I ran away leaving her to somehow sweep up her own pieces.
The months that followed my fuck-up were full of me begging forgiveness and failing to fix a thing. The three years after that were suddenly radio silent; an unexpected blackout of communication that left me both in aching denial and with the glacial understanding of what I had truly done to the one person that could see behind my mask before I was even aware I was wearing one.
Eventually, connection was once again made. Periodic texts were sent and received on birthdays and holidays, sometimes randomly throughout the year from one of us to make sure the other was still alive.
She was living on an island in the gulf and dating someone new. I moved to the West Coast to join the countless other prospectors sifting for twinkling clichés, but every sliver I found reinforced the idea that maybe gold wasn’t my color.
I had a partner for a few years, then didn’t.
I was alone for another year or so, then wasn’t.
Despite the circumstances either of us were in, I would reach out every so often when the dreams started cutting a little too deep. We still considered ourselves friends in some sense despite the years that had passed, so we would occasionally catch up with a handful of texts just to give each other an update on how life was going.
She was still living in paradise that, by her own words, was starting to feel like a prison. Her relationship was rotting and she had no way out. Every day she got to lay on a pristine beach being lapped by beautifully blue bathwater under a cloudless sky while watching the sun dip into a horizon painted with God’s favorite pastels…and feel absolutely miserable doing it.
I was in a relationship that was going two years strong…ish. I was with someone that I thought had the majority of traits I had been trying so impatiently to find in a partner; traits that made up a mental checklist I assumed would be enough to commit a life to were enough of them ticked.
But shared interests don’t make up for a lack of chemistry, compromise doesn’t make up for compatibility, and no number of small boxes checked can make up for the huge one left vacant.
Two years in and I was starting to notice a familiar complacency in our relationship. I was getting irritated easier and wanted to be by myself more often. As it so happened, my girlfriend was going to be gone for a few months. It was during this time I felt more relief to be alone than I was anticipating.
It was also during this time I had a dream that, unbeknownst to me, would start a chain reaction that would end with me rearranging my entire life.
…
It wasn’t the best dream ever, or some kind of nightmare like the title of this article might suggest, but it struck a chord so deep inside me that I could almost physically feel the inevitability of what was coming.
I know no one wants me to go into detail about what the dream was about because reading about someone else’s dream is even worse than listening to it in person. Plus, I honestly barely remember. All I remember is how I felt in the few fleeting moments before I woke up; before I was thrust back into the memories of my mistakes and the skull that contained them.
It had been ten years and she still haunted the hallways of my mind. In my dream, we were together, we were being intimate, and I felt the warm coalescence of the eternal merge. I was finally experiencing the level of purity that her love had been offering me all those years ago.
In that illusory moment, blissfully naked, lost in the jungle of her curls, and on the very brink of lucid ruin reminding me of the mechanics behind the magic, I woke up.
I opened my eyes and the comforting haze of compelling theta waves pulled back like low tide static. And without the salty fizzle of surf hitting sand, a beach becomes nothing more than a desert offering no excuse for being there.
This brings us back to where we started.
What I experienced in that dream and the subsequent moments after getting out of bed felt nothing less than tragic. Like I said, there were countless other times I had dreams about her, but for some reason, this time felt as if I had opened a gateway into a life that was still possible. It not only felt possible, it felt imminent, and it gave me a staggering amount of anxiety.
I had resisted having much, if any, contact with my ex while I was dating my then-girlfriend not only out of respect for our relationship but to continue convincing myself that I had finally moved on. However, that particular morning I couldn’t help reaching out to tell her how I felt I was cursed to have her showing up in my dreams for all eternity, that I felt bad popping up on her phone only to once again remind her of the past and everything that could have been, that I didn’t think I could ever 100% shake her and that I merely wanted to keep our connection alive despite the reality of our situations.
It had been over a year and a half since we spoke last, and she texted back within 20 minutes.
She told me how she felt the same, and how I wasn’t the only one with cursed dreams. She told me she felt like she would’ve been the weird one for bringing any of this up to me, so she just never did. She had never truly moved on, and given the toxicity of the situation she was currently living in, she had been thinking about me more than ever.
We knew that our individual circumstances played a small part in how much we were thinking of each other, but there was no denying the past ten years of longing. There was no denying the restless nights and hollow mornings reaching out to hug a memory.
I say it was a bad dream that changed my life, but it was only how I felt after having it that felt terrible enough to stick in my mind like a splinter of clarity. I had always known in my heart that I would somehow see her again, regardless of our life’s detours, I just didn’t know how.
I knew now. I could see time unfolding in front of me and knew how difficult the foreseeable future was going to be. I knew that I didn’t want to live the rest of my life without her and I knew everything that was going to entail. I couldn’t quite articulate it at the time, but the feeling in my gut knew what was coming.
The relationship I was in fell apart because the legs it stood on weren’t sturdy enough. There was no shared worldview, no understood sensibilities. There was only the person I thought I wanted to be and the person she thought I was, but just… wasn’t. We existed on a three-legged stool, and waking up that morning felt like someone had kicked one of them out.
Our relationship inevitably ended for obvious reasons. We weren’t connecting and my mind was being pulled into a past where the one person who’s ever truly understood me was showing her face again.
It had been seven years since I actually saw her face, and after only three months of talking she was on a plane from across the country to visit me; the first person in my five years of living on the West Coast that one friend has come to visit, and of all the people that could have come…
The week we had together was perfect, and then she went home.
Two months later I flew out to visit her, then I went home.
Now, I’m planning on packing up my shit and hitting the road again to try and start an actual life with the one person I wasn’t sure I’d ever see again. The one person whose love has always been of the highest and most unconditional caliber. A love I once held at an age where I couldn’t recognize the gift for what it was. Against all odds, I was given a chance to hold it again, and this time, I’m not letting go.
I know the sacrifices I had to make and the ones still ahead of me. I understand who I hurt in the process of this realization and how this all may sound to someone on the outside looking in, but if you could see what I saw that morning, feel what I felt in those few fleeting moments before my eyes opened and my deflated heart melted out of my chest, you just might see just how powerful a single dream can be.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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