I'm sorry. I'm so, so, sorry.
I would never do those things with her, though, not in real life. That's not ever what I had with her.
I think when I dream, it's the only way my mind can process that emotion. It's showing her I love her, in the only way it can. I touch her face in my dream, just because I want to be close to her again.
Something big has always been missing, something torn out from inside of me, ever since I can remember. I don't know who took it, but the void was manageable. I could live in symbiosis with my fear, loss, uncertainly about who I am.
However lost I felt, however far from feeling whole, at the very least, I had her. Like a mirror, something to gaze into and see everything I needed to know about myself. Looking at her, I saw calm, and assuredness, the shadow of what I was missing. She was a tourniquet, stopping the bleeding, when she couldn't heal the limb that was barely hanging by a thread.
I don't remember the last time I held her, but when I did, she smelled like years and years ago. She smelled like her bedroom. Incense, clean. A cheap perfume from Rue 21. No matter how old we got, it always brought me back to somewhere safe.
She was the strong one, I think maybe she was always taking care of me. Letting me stay over when I was sad, visiting me when I was sick and curled up on the bathroom floor. There was never a time where I didn't want to see her.
But there was always a tense undercurrent, for years, and maybe sometimes, we were very, very different.
When I left her, I just wanted to have some sort of connection. I'd attach myself to people, around her, near her. I'd get farther and farther away from her, six degrees apart, and I could never let her go. I never, ever wanted to hurt her- I just wanted some semblance of her to hold on to. I had to let go, eventually.
When I did, I kept asking myself what I could have done differently. A word I could keep in my mouth, staying a few minutes extra, listening a little closer. Reading her face. But through a haze of vodka, it was hard to see anything, and it was warm going down my throat; I was burning another bridge.
Maybe, sometimes, there isn't anything that can be done.
After all of this, I felt a string break, and I've never been the same. I go through life much too careful, much to scared. I blamed it on someone else who hurt me then. But I think that losing her made me feel like I wasn't a solid being, like there was no floor under my feet. I wander about, sending silent pleas into the world. I'm looking for a safe face in the crowd, someone to see myself inside.
Was any of it real?
There's not a person in the world who I will ever feel that with again. We will not have grown together, and I don't think I will ever look into someone's eyes and see so many parts of myself, and someone who can feel what I'm thinking so truly.
Have you ever loved someone so much you felt like you were the same person?
I dream that we're on that tattered couch, in the back room of a place we used to visit every day.
The door to the garden full of grass and weeds is open, and the ancient rug feels scratchy under my feet. A fat, white candle burns on an antique tv dinner stand, and there's a small dog sleeping in the corner. I'm wearing the glasses I found at a yard sale, and there's a half eaten tin of cheesecake between us. She made it, brought it from home.
She has a cigarette, and she blows smoke rings. Her hair is long and full, and she's glowing. She's wearing a shirt in an ugly color, but one that I know is her favorite. She smiles when I ask her about her life. I want to know everything about her. I want to extinguish her cigarette, but somehow, I know if I do, I'll wake up. I gently pull it from her hand, and set it in an ashtray.
I pull her face close to mine, and tell her everything I've always wanted to say, but I know, when I look into her eyes, that she knows it already.
I'm stitching us back together, I'll do whatever it takes. She smiles and tells me, we are fine.
