I close my eyes and sleep…
In a world not much different to this,
I’m with you.
It’s you, as you were, as you might have been,
Your views, your ways
Of course, it isn’t you,
but my memory and reconstruction of you;
Maybe that’s all I ever knew – the outside,
the facade, the shell and mask.
I think I knew you, I think you let me.
But I was arrogant and insular, I’m sure
I coloured my thoughts of you with my own
expectations, prejudices and preferences.
You, I’m sure, were much more than I thought.
Even as I admired and loved you, you had more
depth, secrets, complexities that I didn’t recognise.
When I dream of you, I often don’t know you’re dead.
The situations, either mundane or dreamworld-bizarre
evolve as naturally as they might; we’re together.
Then something happens and I realise,
sometimes only on waking, that you aren’t going to be next to me,
for me to tell you about my dream.
Other times, we all know that you had been dead, though now somehow alive…
but you don’t.
All of us trying to find a way of living,
without telling you that you had been dead;
without anyone else finding out that you are alive again
a nameless dread awaiting if they did.
Once, it was only me who knew;
you and everyone else thinking (knowing?) that you’d recovered and not died…
the doubt that I was wrong and the fear that I was right left me in a sweat when I awoke,
disoriented – reaching an arm across to your side of the bed to check what was real.
I have never dreamt that you knew and I didn’t.
If I could dream of you, with you, I’d happily never wake up.