Thought You Should Know

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!” - Call Me By Your Name, by Andre Aciman

Thought You Should Know

By Muriel Palanca

We spend a third of our lives sleeping, tessellating between REM cycles and moon pies. And in the moments between the edge of sunrise pulling through my eyelids and the glorious depths of my dreamscapes, I’m with you.

In most of my dreams we fight things: like wily clowns, cursed pirates and walruses. I think it’s because we were always fighting in real life. We fought the distance, the misunderstandings, the wrong choices and eventually each other.

The world got in our way and we lost. 

But in my dreams, we always win, by a very small margin and because of an unlikely turn of events. We come to the moment where all hope seems lost but miraculously, we pull through. We keep the suspense going because anything worth fighting for is never won easily.

I don’t know why I make it difficult. I mean, it’s my dream, you know? I could dream we’re on the couch with you playing video games and me doing homework on my laptop. Maybe I'd just dream of us making love on your bed. I know it’s redundant to dream of being in a bed while I’m sleeping on a bed, but I like having wet dreams too.

Why can’t my dreams be blissfully ordinary? 

Grocery trips to Wal-Mart, eating ham sandwiches, watching the Colbert Report, watering plants.

But that’s not why you loved me. 

Because every morning when I'd wake up next to you, I would tell you about Moosetopia and how the pot pies aren't made out of chicken and the waterslide is broken so Bruce Willis has a love child with another woman and I'm being chased by a witch on stilts but it's alright because I learned how to bounce like an Irish goodbye and the witch uses the stilts as a broomstick so I hop on Totoro and we throw seeds at that girl from Game of Thrones who says mi’lord and fingernails always get everywhere so obviously the only way out is to jump off the edge of a cliff.

Or something like that.

The point is: I didn’t have nightmares, I had adventures. And it was ok if you weren’t in them because I knew, in some echo of my subconscious, you were sleeping right next to me and I was safe. And when I woke up, we’d have adventures in the real world: like going to the grocery store, making the best sandwiches, picking what to watch on TV, watering our plants.

I don’t have that anymore. I only have you when I’m sleeping, for eight hours a day, between work and recreation. Between missing you and missing out.

We go on quests. You slay the evil badger while I rescue the crown jewels. We are heroes. We save the day. We save each other. 

When we’re done, we lay in the wheat fields of bunny kingdom as the glowing sunset and jewel beetles listen to us recount our epic tales of bravery. We laugh and hold each other in this fleeting piece of forever.

And we’re happy. Really happy. As happy as we used to be. 

Just thought you should know.