I’ve forgotten how to dream

We were on a train, a blur of motion, as we always were. I was trying to hold him in my eye. I thought we had separated. I couldn’t understand what had brought us back together. In the dream I felt (as I did then) that I’d never leave, as if it were all impossible.

The sea keeps returning to me at night. This time, the train is passing through southern Florida, through a soft rural town that looked more like a vacated city in heaven. There was a barn, tilted as barns are when they’re left too long without visitor. It was beautiful, and desolate. We were trying to figure whether we were going to cross the country in train or in a car. We were already in a train moving west, but somehow, we knew it wasn’t too late to go back if we wanted to. I’ll confess. I felt safe crossing the country with him. I was relieved not to do it alone, as I’d planned.

But he was far from me. In all my dreams and all our days, he’d always been far. There and not there. His body here, his eyes there.

This morning, in that rural town by the sea, he was with me, and still I knew that he could easily leave me at any moment to continue alone. Nothing was promised, and time with him felt like a rope I could never set aside.