p.e.k.
i dreamt of you for the first time last night. i'd just been thinking yesterday: "i wonder when i will dream of peter." you must have heard me, or my heart/psyche just needed so desperately to connect with you.
in this dream, our friendship and your disappearance were much the same: brief but intense, and traumatic but not entirely unexpected, respectively. we were in berkeley for some reason, and you were living with a bunch of syrian immigrants. we saw each other around town, at the gym, our friendship covered in layer after layer of everyday americana. your voice drawled, drawing horizons of cornfields and plains, the only sound i could hear in the dream. besides wheels on gravel when the car that would take you away pulled up outside your house.
in the dream, i had suddenly remembered it was october 3, the day this year when ISIS named you as its next target. in the dream, i knew i had to get to you, i knew this was bad. i ran through a door in your house, but you were already answering the knocking at the front door. i just saw the back of you - your buzzed hair, the white shirt you always wore for nights out in Beirut - before they pulled you into the black car waiting outside. you didn't struggle. you seemed to know this was coming. and the men who lived with you did too.
i hated myself for waiting so long, for not getting to you sooner and warning you of what was coming.
i woke up crying, missing you, so sorry for all i left unsaid: both the encouragement and love i should have given you in more abundance, and the gentle warnings i should have persisted with when i saw you. in the face of your beauty and bravery, peter, i cowered, not wanting to encourage too much or warn too often. i know that no matter what i'd said, you still would have gone on ahead. that was your way, and it is something i love(d) most about you. so let this be a lesson then: in the face of a fierce spirit, let only love speak. and let your spirit be carried forward by those of us lucky enough to have enjoyed the gorgeous complexity that you were.
in this dream, our friendship and your disappearance were much the same: brief but intense, and traumatic but not entirely unexpected, respectively. we were in berkeley for some reason, and you were living with a bunch of syrian immigrants. we saw each other around town, at the gym, our friendship covered in layer after layer of everyday americana. your voice drawled, drawing horizons of cornfields and plains, the only sound i could hear in the dream. besides wheels on gravel when the car that would take you away pulled up outside your house.
in the dream, i had suddenly remembered it was october 3, the day this year when ISIS named you as its next target. in the dream, i knew i had to get to you, i knew this was bad. i ran through a door in your house, but you were already answering the knocking at the front door. i just saw the back of you - your buzzed hair, the white shirt you always wore for nights out in Beirut - before they pulled you into the black car waiting outside. you didn't struggle. you seemed to know this was coming. and the men who lived with you did too.
i hated myself for waiting so long, for not getting to you sooner and warning you of what was coming.
i woke up crying, missing you, so sorry for all i left unsaid: both the encouragement and love i should have given you in more abundance, and the gentle warnings i should have persisted with when i saw you. in the face of your beauty and bravery, peter, i cowered, not wanting to encourage too much or warn too often. i know that no matter what i'd said, you still would have gone on ahead. that was your way, and it is something i love(d) most about you. so let this be a lesson then: in the face of a fierce spirit, let only love speak. and let your spirit be carried forward by those of us lucky enough to have enjoyed the gorgeous complexity that you were.