My dreams last night took me to a place so deep I woke up to a reality that felt less real.
Jerry and I were cleaning out a garage. He was helping me because I’d asked him to. I noticed our hands kept touching but he and I–it is what it is so as always I feel nothing for him except a twitch of something buried so deep inside it exists in a dimension that is not this one.
It was exhausting and we collapse in these two white sofa chairs. We were talking about firemen or something. Our hands touch and I push my mind away from it immediately out of habit but this time, he curls his fingers into mine and he is holding my hand. We are connected. His hand was cool, not exactly soft, but very real. Skin I remember from a time beyond time. The hands of a man that brought a universe of feelings to my throat but I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t even look at him. Just sat there, frozen by his touch.
Come here, he said. I look at him and he’s looking at me the way I catch him sometimes. But this time it’s out there. It’s no longer hidden. I get up and sit down, kind of on him because the seat is only big enough really for one person and he wraps his arms around me and kisses me, and his lips are soft and gentle and remind me of an entire distant lifetime but I know it’s wrong because he doesn’t belong to me this time around. Someone will get hurt now.
He says to me to be patient. That he’ll figure it out but it’ll be “after” and I’m at once furious because after all this it’s still not me and I’m sad because this is tragic. She’s a good woman and I have broken my moral code. I have broken myself because of not being able to let go.
That’s all it was. The handhold. One kiss. Despair. I woke up to find it was exactly 7:30 and I was supposed to be at a breakfast meeting. I never got my wake up call. As I scrambled to get ready, I couldn’t stop thinking about the dream. It was hauntingly real, the textures, the way I felt so high and so low at the same time. Throughout the rest of the day, battle after battle, my mind never left the touch of his fingers curling around mine.
The dream scared me.