I Still Dream About You

If you’re wondering, yes. I still dream about you.

Not every single night, but it’s always unexpected. Always when I tuck the covers under my chin and pull the pillows behind my back like a fortress keeping me safe; always when I close my eyes with other thoughts on my mind.

I dream about you in all the ways I remember you—with your hair chopped short, in your parents’ house, at that outside restaurant in northern California, in your messy bedroom with the puppy curled between us, watching TV.

Sometimes you’re the same, stubborn and distant, and I’m trying to decipher the expression on your face. Sometimes you’re completely different, grabbing my hand and turning it over in yours like it’s something you’ve never seen, pulling me to you, sliding closer to me in the diner booth.

In some dreams, we’re in places I’ve never been. Rooms with tile floors and beach views, basements with cobwebs and no windows, busses to unknown destinations and neither of us are driving, distracted by one another’s eyes, even when the tires are spinning and we’re flying around corners.

Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we don’t say anything. But we kiss. Then I wake up with my heart beating and my hands sweating and the blankets wrapped around my legs and my mind still spinning from the taste of your lips.

Yes, I still dream about you. Then I wake to the silence of my bedroom and mixed feelings, anger and sadness and longing swirling around my heart. And I wonder what you’re dreaming, miles away, blankets and sheets and bedrooms away, if you’re even sleeping. And then, before I roll over and drift away again, I ask the question I’ll never know the answer to: why.