I Feel Lonely With Anyone Who Isn’t You

I wake up at 2:17 am and involuntarily reach for you in the dark. You’re not there of course. I let you go, convinced we didn’t have a future.

But my dreams have a tendency of forgetting that.

When I sleep, we’re together and happy, better and more in love than we ever were in real life. That’s what makes waking up so jarring. I’m thrust from a dream of golden days, only to wake up gasping and feeling for you next to me in this cold bed that’s never felt so empty.

“If I don’t do this now it will only hurt more later,” I said, thinking I was wiser than my years could account for.

I’ve brought other people to bed since you, but these sheets feel even colder with them than they do when I’m alone.

Instead, I lay awake staring at the ceiling for what feels like an eternity, composing texts to you in my head, but there isn’t anything I can say to close the divide I created between us that day. You were right when you said I’d regret this.

I guess you were right about a lot of things, but I just never cared to listen, always thinking that I above all others knew what was best.

It’s three am now and I still can’t sleep, I’m tired of staring at the ceiling. I get up and make myself a drink, warm rum counts as “making” a drink, right? I check my phone but you haven’t texted me, and why would you? I know I’ll move on, I have before, and there will be others who warm this bed again, but until then, I’ll drink and stare at my ceiling until I dream again.

Because dreams are the only place I can still hold onto the ghost of our shattered past.