"I'm reaching, I'm reaching for you..."
All yesterday, I was searching for a word- some sense, some actual way of expressing- something stronger than Missing.
The thread-count of longing this dense; I wondered again and again, is this simply what comes when your body betrays you? When a dozen, two dozen, what feel like hundreds of voices seem lost to you; bodies you've made love to and faces you haven't even seen yet.
And then last night: You appeared in my dreams.
I want to say of course- the ache of learned spirit-history- but this dream was vastly different from nearly two decades of dreams before it. More real than it's ever felt; more vivid, visceral. Lingering and achingly solid. Ripe with details imprinted on the inner, softest layers of my skin, when I woke: Far more like being together, after the measure of two-thirds of our lives, might actually be.
Through what must be hundreds of dreams; from the breathless dreaming of grade school to bumbling adolescent kisses; from sitting with you on a hill at twenty, as you said it felt you'd not been gone long at all. To now.
Lucid enough that I was able to fight to stay in the dream- to keep talking with and even touching you- nothing I've ever experienced, it felt like our time stretched for hours. And maybe most different of all: This dream was in the Now. It held the very real moments of my recent days. You weren't a fleeting phantom or a grainy childs' face passing through my dreamspace. This was so much more that I woke into sobs so remniscent of our pre-adolescent dramas, it felt I was still asleep.
Are you some masochistic symbol- a sign-post for the lost when the lost becomes me- or is this something more, something else?
Usually you come in waves; in bunches over a month and then you seem to dip back into my subconscious like so much else. But.
Was this you? Do I do something now- though who knows what- or just keep moving in the Now where last night we seemed to kiss for the first time in half a lifetime, sat together to talk for the first time in nearly eight years?
Or was this just among the pushes I need: Caught between circumstance and desperate to rise again, afraid and alone: Was this just my answer-
The true picture of what really is More than Missing.