I Still Dream About You Sometimes

I still dream about you sometimes.

Not like the last one where you told me you would be right back and dropped my hand.

You never came back.

(ultimately, neither did I).

No, in these dreams it is like it used to be.

Before.

Before all of the bullshit and the bickering and the booze.

When it was two people who I would like to believe cared for each other.

Dare I say, even loved each other.

I still remember the one night where I knew in that moment you loved me.

I wish I had more to show from those two years than just one night.

One night where your monsters did not overshadow who you really were.

Except sometimes I wonder if all the monsters would not have come, would this still have been my forever?

Are you actually deep down this person?

(a question we would all be more comfortable with being rhetorical).

Browsing the busy bookshelves filled to the brim with strangers’ memories of the past.

Holding hands because in that moment maybe you did not have to pretend that you liked me.

(I always liked to joke and tell you to hold my hand and pretend that you liked me; I am not laughing).

And I did not have to pretend I was okay with complacency.

In that moment we were a young couple in love.

The thing movies were made on

And older couples cooed at fondly.

Why was it so hard to make a moment last?

If the love could be there then, how could it not have been there all along?

Did you place it back on the shelf and exchange it for something more practical, sturdier, much more stable?

Maybe you left it behind for the next couple who needed a little more hope than we did.

Someone whose future could have been a little brighter than the sadness we both set our dreams on.

That night in bed you blurted out the words, “I love you.”

I will never forget that moment for that was the moment in my life that I knew I had your love, and you had mine, and maybe, this could actually work.

It did not.

And it is years later, and this moment still haunts me.

How you can be so close one second

And light years away the next?

How you can invest so much in one person

Only to have them discard you without a second thought?

How can you keep wanting to try this again,

When this is the only result that you know?