Dream's Device to Morning's Sight

I was just woken up by thoughts of you and pain in my chest. Apparently all that we've gone through has left it's mark. A piece of real estate is permanently yours inside my heart. During my darkest of days when all seemed lost you were there beside me and together we survived.

My dream was like a WB Drama. Something I don't watch. Except for season 6 of Gilmore Girls because I was at camp without anything else on and I watched the whole thing in a few days. Then I went and read on the internet what happened in the next season. I was pissed. Still am. I like Luke. I haven't watched an episode since.

But in my dream we were both at some social party with other people we didn't really care for. We saw each other out of the corner of our eyes but nothing was said or acknowledgement given. Instead you drew close to your date an kissed. It kicked me in the gut. It floored me. All of this after the passage of what? 5,6,8,11 years? So what did I do? Well I very obviously kissed my date publicly for all to see, in unacknowledged acknowledgement of you. A serious teen drama. What an oxymoron it seems. So, in my dream, I walked outside and felt sick in my stomach. Being with the one I was with rather than who? You, the one I wanted. Then our dates walked away in perfectly scripted timing as you came out for air too. We didn't see each other until it was too late. I wanted to say that I missed you. But you were angry at my kissing the girl. I tried to explain but it came out muddled. It only made it worse. You stormed away. I hurt. But it was all so deeply hidden. So deep that it could only come out in a dream. Only in the dark hours of the night. Only at 5am in the dark damn morning. No rationality, only pure emotion; raw; visceral.

The kind of emotion you feel deep in the still of the night. Half asleep they run rampantly willy nilly. (Whoever is that Willy Nilly fellow? He must be in great shape!) The kind of emotions and thoughts that aren't available in the day, aren't available when awake, because all of that rationality gets in the way. So I'll say it now when I'm still half asleep. I love you. Always will. You live in a house on a swamp in the corner of my heart and you always will.

I'll wake up later and look at this. Wonder what I ate for dinner, maybe salmon patties and salsa are a poor choice. I'll say some chemical reaction caused my nocturnal heart pangs. But for now I lay here enthralled and weakened by a strength of emotion that isn't able to escape or be felt in the day; in the living hours, or half living hours of the heart-shielded zombies. Shuffling around surface relationships looking for something that will surpass the past, or at least help express it.

The taste is fresh on my lips and the last note of a certain song still lingers in my ear. It always will. It will always be there. As life and time move on. Of course I want to call you right now. Irrational as it would seem in the morning. I want to tell you how much you mean to me. How much you helped me through. How for a time you were a large part of me. What is this? Jerry McGuire?

Teenage drama. How I loathe it. All that hormonal/emo crap. No control. At the whim and fancy of enzymes, receptors, and high school girls. The best a guy can do is try to shrug into a survival suit as he's tossed overboard, try not to inhale too much salt water, and pray to the weather gods that they will look down with mercy upon the poor sick fool.

Of course the phone call will never happen. As I wake up, it never will. Things in the night stay there and the day clouds the night with it's intellectual "higher functioning" light.

The ravages of heavy emotions move on leaving various detrius and debris in their wake.

I won't call you with this. Maybe I'll email you. Say Hi. Wish you well. The day time thoughts of a day time world over top the night time heart untold. Because it is day now. The light is lifting the spell; the curse. To the night it is magic, to feel, to be held in thrall, to ache, and pine, and fly, and soar. To the morning's advance it is silly dreaming. I love silly dreams. I love the magic. And on that acreage to the side of that aorta or ventricle, whatever it's called, I'll always love you.

Well I'm lying here now more awake, and somewhat aghast at all I've written about all that's past during the last 4 plus page expression of me on paper. Now the head comes creeping in. Can't damn well leave good enough alone. Starts looking for connections and in it's arrogant self conceit starts making them too. "You like penguins because you had a penguin toy in your crib." And crap like that. Maybe I like penguins because I damn well like them. Maybe it was just an easy project to do every year in school because I'd just repackage the previous year's assignment; with updated art work and bibliography of course. They shouldn't be upset. It's just like what they text book people do.

I know that I want to, one day, have another deep thrilling scary painful wonderful amazing relationship. And I know I don't feel ready yet. So I find short term ones, which is a step up from the "unrequited give me journal fodder artistic pining" ones, thankfully. So I run into people who, like me, are interested in something with out pressure, with out a long term 3 year forecast. But I want them to have that wonderful thing my heart once alluded to; connected to. And I feel that I'm not able to be that person yet. And they say they're ok with that, just be here for a bit longer. But I want that something more that frightens me, that calls me onward, that wakes me up in the middle of the night with WB Drama Dreams. And I want that for me, so of course I want that for them too. Because it does really all come from out of the same place. It's just easier sometimes to externalize rather than look at the deeper, personal, more intimate truth. And I'm not willing to support the lesser pursuit of mediocrity anymore. I want more for me and them. Not just the temporary fulfilment of a moments validation. Not just to be together so you're not alone. If that's the case I'll choose the alone that I might be available for the better. I'd rather be alone in stillness seeking the truth, then surrounded and encased in the hollow lie.

Maybe one day when we're old and gray we'll run into each other and then we'll say "Hey way back yonder when we were younger here's how it went down." Then we'll go sit on the porch swing, hold hands, sip tea, and smile and shake our heads as we watch the little school boys pester the little school girls and remember how it all started so very long ago. Maybe.