Dream a Little Dream

The hands that ghost over me are intimately familiar. The warmth of her breath on my neck, her scent in my nostrils, the shape of her body against me. Her lips on my skin, and the voice that makes me shiver, though I can never make out her words. All of it so well known to me that I would recognize it in my sleep.

Probably because that’s always where I find it. In the dark of night, deep in my dreams. Banished by the light of the waking world. I’m in love with a figment of my imagination, and I should probably be more bothered by that fact than I actually am. But as I struggle against wakefulness and the dream leaves me, my only regret is not that I’m in love with a specter—but that she’s gone when I open my eyes.

The waking world holds little for me. I ghost through my days, going through the motions of life, counting the moments until sleep and dreams return me to her. I don’t belong in the waking world, don’t want to be here, but I have yet to find a permanent way into the land of dreams. Nor do I know any way to bring her here, not that I would want to. The waking world—I refuse to call it the real world—with its greed and hate and constant go, go, go, and take, take, take. She doesn’t belong here.

Some nights sleep refuses to come. Those nights feel long and endless, taunting sleeplessness that leaves me begging. Those nights I long for release. For the whisper of a touch that haunts me and the dream that never comes. The days that follow are full of mindless pain and longing.

But inevitably sleep finds me again. Sleep, and her touch. Whispers I can never recall, a taste I can never forget.