You will think this is about you, and that’s fine because it is.
I dreamt of you. I dreamt of you and it was painful. It was sweet and it was solid and it was a lie. I don’t know why I kissed you, but I did and it hurt the most because I knew in my awake life I would know even better, yet I would act the same.
The concert was a melted sort of ache, the kind you think about for longer than it exists. The kind you wrap up like leftovers and sniff when you feel happy, just to wallow. Wallow, wade, weave yourself into a bath of clear-pitched sound. Her voice was mine, the time you told me it was, before you forgot everything. I used to sing in the shower, and then one day I didn’t. Last week I tried it again, and I worried about the neighbors, forgot where to start, what words would hold true. I suppose it doesn’t matter what I am to you now, as long as I am not what I was to myself, then.
I dreamt of you. You were sad and bent and I was flitting and distracted, which is true in more ways than I wish to know. You, cowed and observant, listening to voices cloudy with meaning. Your hand on the curve of my back. That guy over there stood with that girl over here and everything here is colored squeeze and violet, like heartbreak but after. That girl over there is standing away from that guy over here.
What is the thing that holds? Once, I sang. On a stage and it was true, in a shower and it was ashy, in your car - or was it mine? Who is the girl who matters, since it’s real until it isn’t. And back again, I suppose.
There is something easier about a steady state of later potential. Something about delayed gratification that takes less courage. But fuck it because I want to be brave and strong, and now I am here. At this concert, this guy over here and that one over there, and you, nowhere to be found and everywhere I look all at once.
You kissed me on the nose, and I should have known. I pushed it, and it was cold, familiar, leftovers wrapped up in a napkin. The ache that melts from the sound of the lights, it rings in my ear and down the left side of my throat. A direct line, tethered to my heart. My heart, swollen and purple, like a day-old bruise.
I dream in echoes of color, and I dream of you often. You will think this is about you, and it is, but it isn’t because dream you is different and awake me isn’t as strong, just braver, and I know no other sadness with the same reach, the same marionette lines to my organs. And neither do you.
I’ve been sure of so many things and I’ve been wrong of so many of them. But always, I’ve dreamt of you.