memory of march 19 to today.

I fell asleep the night before I would have to go. The pond played its usual notes that I had learned to recognize, grown to enjoy and which moved me beyond comfort and into a state of lightness. I had been sad just before it became dark—restless all through the day. There were many reasons but they all involved the same theme. I was leaving, I feared goodbyes and I had not been able to say sorry when it was one thing I needed most. A past relation came over instead. And the irony made me sick with sadness. But there were unlimited ways I had benefited from being together again. Moments I have archived in memory and which one day I will immortalize by writing them into a materialized existence—captured between the frame, isolated, reissued, celebrated, enduring through passing time. The moment he stepped into my home, I acted distant and disagreed with his—for lack of better terms—stoned nature. I responded this way because I knew I could and knew it was not like me to inflict such conscious control. We sat by the pond and illustrated the past. He smoked numerous cigarettes to ease our difference and I sat there looking off and silently thinking through the outstretch of my mind. Night turned us into shadows and so we withdrew indoors and lied shoeless on my bed. I played music to him and for us—and he responded by playing into me. He told me that I had always been the most romantic. I kept his words and said nothing. Our bodies turned and took on their individual poses and I grew more sad with nostalgia and expectancy—that by tomorrow I would go back to sleeping alone, with no arms to curtain me and no eyes to grab my sight and hold my attention. We laughed and became two children in love right before he fell asleep. I watched him leave me behind earlier than he ever has—because usually I fall asleep first. And that was when I was sure the time had changed. I let my body mirror his positioning, and felt the softness that he had still retained since I touched him last. I fell in and out of sleep that night, my dreams being short vignettes that—I did not know at the time but discovered after—were portraits of the future. I dreamt most vividly of being back in the city and in the subway station. I received a call, which was highly unusual knowing that there is no reception beneath the ground. Picking up I did not recognize the voice completely—not because I did not know it but because I knew time had changed it. It was truly the boy of my dreams (who had turned no more real once we began dating). In the dream he told me one thing—he had just made it to Berlin. I woke there after and remembered the impossibility of the dream. I have never seen myself in my dream (or maybe I have and just not recognized how I really look) but I have felt myself and I have experienced my being there. I have felt all the scenes being enacted on me and that is why I trust there is an element of reality imbued in them. I woke up who I was sleeping with knowing it was best to have him go. Part of me felt guilty for dreaming of another boyfriend with him being there—it seemed all too close to reality and the reality of my mind always being elsewhere than where I am physically present. Hours later I boarded a flight back to the New York. I fell asleep again and woke once we had landed. Turning on my cell phone, I saw I had received a voice mail. It was from the boy in my dream telling me he had arrived in Berlin. This is a true story and yet I can find no other way to describe it other than unreal. I had not spoken to him on the phone in two years. And yet I was imagining nothing—the dream was not a dream but an ideal that became real hours later. In the message he said he would try to call that night, but I never audibly heard from him again—only in letters. Today I received another letter from him telling me had just tried to call me but had no luck. I cannot get over this likelihood—my cell phone was just stolen two nights ago, making me out of touch, out of reach and more apparently distant, again. I know that most people think one should let go of what is no longer present or showing tangible presence. But I know that if I were to do that I would have so few things and that there would be no reason to have experiences, create memories or make meaning. The softer side of me speaks to: I fall few times and I when I fall, I fall deeply and love somehow, somewhere and in some place always. The thought of him will never escape me—which reminds me of how real he is.