rapid

My dreams are beginning to mix with my reality, as dreams tend to do -- at least the less absurd ones, the ones starring past lovers and set in your quiet, abandoned homes. These are the dreams that stick around, dyeing the wool of the day a deep brown, like recently unearthed soil.

I have these dreams of you. And you, too. There are a few of you who haunt me without apology while my eyes are closed and my heart is open. It seems like a rather cruel joke, wouldn't you agree? But if you agreed, you'd leave me alone.

And you do leave me alone. You leave me alone once my eyes open and I close that door I carelessly forgot to shut last night. I am not crestfallen, not really. I understand the basics of the unconscious mind, how we make connections with the successions of emotions and sensations. You (and you and you) are faceless images, ideas, symbols. Nothing more.

At least not anymore. Not now, not after we have both told ourselves that we are our own creations, that the other is nothing more than an illusion. We fill our days with smoke and mirrors. We pull the unexpected out of a hat and saw the trusting in half. We promised to put each other back together, but we must have gotten sidetracked. Somewhere. Somewhere along the overgrown paths to the houses we left lifetimes ago.

I leave my sheets how they are, startled and tangled. I'll make my bed later.