One day, about 35 years into it, I stopped telling and started reading the story. With the din of my own blah blah blah still buzzing about my head, I focused hard and read a documentary – our life as it really had and had not been.
You told me early on you’d no plans to spend your life at the end of my pen, and I’ve honoured that, even as I’ve remembered cherished others in bits and pieces, here and there, lost to me.
This is not about you.
I had the dream again last night. It’s never twice the same but has a plane of its own in my dreamscape. Once, maybe twice a half-decade it brings you back into view as the dream you once were to me. Last evening, in my garden – expanded beyond its customary half acre, dappled light and dark under the quaking of imagined aspen leaves – you sat on a lawn chair mid-yard, beside me but just far enough in front that you had to turn slightly back over your right shoulder to lean toward me, which you did, and grasped my right hand in your left.
You looked at me, and asked, “Will you never see me again?”
I said, “There’s too much pain.”
Your eyes fixed on mine in a way I’ve never seen them fixed with such a look. In our real life, you rarely met my eyes.
You are 40, in this dream. You seem to love me.
Now we’re in a kitchen – it, too, quaking with aspen light and shadows, a gossamer shimmer to the scene. High ceiling with a glass roof and windowed walls. You embrace me. You kiss me – again in a way I’d never felt in the thousands of kisses of our real life. The kiss ends. I wake. Again I’m apart from what I’ve never known. Again I’m untethered from myself and imagining in the world a thing for me that has never been here.
No more telling, no tales. I will read the book of dreams and see there who we are and what has been.
The only insurmountable in love is its want.
Gossamer Universe 
❤
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