a dream of my making

I get to see him in dreams so I think this means I did actually love him and that my “I have never been in love” admissions have been false ones.

Love does not have to be good or kind or healthy or bring out the best in us to truly be love. I loved the hand-rolled cigarettes that waited for me at the end of a workday and eventually the start of ones when I was at my most depressed and there was nothing healthy or happy about that.

I dream about many people, almost boyfriends, childhood friends, that girl I used to grab lunch with, but only certain people make it into my lucid dreams. I think they are there for one of two reasons. One, because they are people I love or loved, and two, because I choose to bring them into this space of sleeping wakeness.

I open my eyes and I am standing in my grandmother's kitchen or on the cracked sidewalk behind the house, I call to the woman who holds three-quarters of the love from my young life, and then she is there beside me, joining me in a house that is not changed in the ways of time.

It is the same with him. am sitting in the back of a moving car with something pressed between my lips, probably the black and milds we bought on my eighteenth birthday, and he is there beside me. I do not tell him that I love him or I miss him or that I wish we had chosen a version of life that includes us together. I tell him the truth instead.

I smile and am suddenly somewhere between 16 and 21 with all of the joyful knowing I did not have in my young adult lifetime. I get to hold his hand again and look at the place where a collared shirt meets the back of a smooth soft neck and I tell him things have worked out exactly how they should. That he needed to do a little less living and I needed to do a little more. That he has love now and two little girls and that I finally have myself.

He smiles back because he knows having myself or me belonging to me is what I always really wanted.

The air feels light between us for the first time because this version of me that has lived is not waiting for him to leave. You cannot leave someone who is swiftly moving through a life that belongs to only them.

I choose to stay in that backseat and love him a little longer because this is a dream of my making. I could go find or call to other people and places of my past but I do not. I sit with him there while the outsides of our legs gently touch like in movie theaters who have the type of arm rests that can be raised in between seats and we say all of the things that need to be said.

And then, I wake up happy. I think about the truths we shared and the moments of first love I got to feel again. My hand goes to the outside of my leg and for a brief moment there under the covers, I can feel the heat where his leg met mine in that dream.