Sweet Dreams

I haven't dreamed about Chris in a while. A couple of weeks, at least. Last night, my brain blessed me with three. I say blessed because each one was really, really nice. After I woke, I laid in bed for another half an hour in a liminal state, relishing warm sensations that happily stayed with me in waking and didn't dissolve into sadness that it was a reality that cannot and very likely will not ever again be attained.

The first was an easy 50/50 combination of an ad in a magazine that I saw yesterday, a couple, sitting on the edge of a sailboat or other sailing vessel, her in a stark white bikini, him sitting behind her, holding her tightly against him, plus one of my favorite Chris memories, which was the last time I was at his place in early January. I was reorganizing my suitcase, sitting on the floor in his bedroom, when a wave of sad came over me and I poutily said something to him (he was in the living room) about how I just felt like crying. He stopped whatever he was doing and basically came rushing in to wrap his long limbs around me (we are the man and woman version of the same body; long arms, long legs, short torso) from behind, sitting on the floor with me, and he just squeezed me, his arms wrapped around my stomach and chest, and I wept a little, and then started laughing, and then kissed him, and thanked him. I remember even in that moment, I thanked him for being him, that that was the kind of thing he would do, and that I loved him for it. Had he not been so sweet to do so, it's likely the sadness would have lingered for an hour or two. He was always good at diffusing those feelings.

So in the dream, I was wearing white cotton panties and a white bra, nothing else, and he squeezed me like that from behind. It was a reunion moment, and as he wistfully laughed into my ear and my body tingled at his touch, he said, "I missed about 70% of you." I thought that seemed a fair enough amount to miss.

The next dream found us in college, and I received a phone call from the Dr. Seuss Foundation (yes, my brain made up a foundation that carries out the continuing publication of children's stories in a similar vein as Seuss) asking me if I had any completed work or ideas that would fit into their publishing schematic, as they'd seen some of my other work (?) and thought I'd be good in their company. I hung up the phone (a landline, like I seriously was in college), and came slinking into the dorm room (which I apparently lived in alone, as there was a single queen sized bed in there, with a man in it). I leapt on top of the half-sleeping man (the sheets, the comforter, were all notably white, as my bra and panties had been white, and the room was full of sunshine), and told him what had happened through the comforter that was draped over his face. I mentioned the book I'd always wanted to write, based on the first story I ever wrote at the age of four, called Robbie the Hummingbird (true story, and Chris and I had talked about working on this together), and I snuzzled into his ear, through his long hair (it wasn't exactly *Chris* in the dream, he was somewhere between Chris and Andy), and said, "But I'll need an artist to do the book with me. And where, would I find someone like that? I don't know any artists!" and we both giggled and pulled back the covers and started kissing. I remember thinking that something was off, that I didn't know this man in my bed, that his features weren't quite right, that he didn't seem connected to me, nor I to him. And then the hair shortened, the nose became smaller, and it was Chris. We attacked one another with love freshly renewed, and my lord, it was the sweetest, most sensual kissing and touching (but not exactly sexual). It was the sort of making out where you somehow feel clean afterward and almost feel you might never need to bathe again.

The third dream, a lady I've met recently who must vaguely remind me of one of Chris's exes (the only one I actually have met, who is a friend of Lindsay's), was courting Chris. I found a notebook with her musings on this (again, notable whiteness in the paper), and I was a bit hurt. This dream is fuzzy at that point. I know I confronted her, and she apologized and said she didn't know how much I cared for Chris. There wasn't much resolution other than that.

Still, I woke up refreshed, and that liminal half hour was like a milk bath. Would that there was a goddamned thing I could do to facilitate any of that feeling between us again...