Elsewheres

You tell me you've been walking at night. You've been waking up in the middle of some moonlight-swathed hour, always elsewhere from where you actually are, seeing him in the places you used to go, meeting him in places you've never been. And yet, always, that sense of already having been there, of having lingered everywhere with the memory of him crossing your sight like some persistent ghost.

You've been dreaming in snapshots, you say: chimeric sequences of finding, being, losing. Some stray wind bringing him to you, a standstill keeping him near, a stray wind taking him away. You, wishing haplessly for that breeze to bring him back, to pass your way again and put the shambles back into place. You, standing in the middle of some remembered space and well-cherished time, holding still even as the dream has gone, closing your eyes and wishing wakefulness away, because daylight always seems to change the landscape, pulls you away from where it all is, away from where he is.

Even the memory of dreaming has been elusive, you say. You have had to summon consciousness to paint the pictures, to sew the pieces together, to weave them all into a symmetric whole.

But the end-result is always the same. You are where you are. And he never is.

For C--