A Street of Dreams

I don't see your face.
But I sense that it's you, a perception of your essence, your being.

The weight of you as I casually sling you on to my hip, holding on to you as you lean giddily, heavily out and away, waving goodbye. Wearing shorts and no shoes or socks, a red t-shirt. It is a warm day and I can feel the heat of your torso.

Chubby hands.
Strange. Your hands were never chubby. They were elegant, long-fingered, people always said you'd have made a good pianist.

And when did you ever wave goodbye? Unless it was through someone else's actions, someone who loved you holding your forearm and swaying it: 'Say bye bye to mummy!' - your wrist waggling as you looked in the opposite direction. Ever the rebel..

But it was you. I know this.

And when the alarm invades I lie still as consciousness seeps in; those few muffled seconds, half awake, half still in a dream. For a while enveloped, cocooned, comforted by your presence and then..
...scrabbling, the mind flailing, panicking, grasping at remnants.

Birds. Traffic. A clattering from the kitchen. The woman moving around in the flat upstairs. All these things I become aware of.

And inevitably, as fine as a spider's web, as soft as gossamer, the warp and weft and threads of you untangle and dissolve into air.

And it's not as if tears come or anything like that. But there's a heaviness, a weariness - I saw you, and now you are gone again.

In the early days I never dreamt of you. I think that was probably a good thing.
I think your brain protects you from yourself, if that make sense.

Or maybe it was just the pills.
'Take one when you need one,' the doc had said. I misunderstood, misheard, was perhaps too far away to listen, but anyway, I took one every night for two weeks and slept the sleep of the dead.

And in the weeks and months afterwards there were tortured, feverish, teasing apparitions with no sense or meaning, just colours, rage, anguish and confusion.
I kept a diary that first year and wrote, in a frenzy at times, all that I could, but there was no meaning in the dreams and little comfort.

Then, just after we'd marked six months, a dream of such clarity.
We were sitting next to each other at a church service, you calm instead of your usual fidgety, shouty self.
I remember a coffin. I think it was your funeral. But afterwards, after people had said goodbye, you and I were walking hand in hand, splashing ankle deep through bright water, so bright, glinting in the sunlight.

It was a terraced street; I remember a long row of houses on each side of us but the light was almost blinding, turning everything into silhouette. I was alongside you but at the same time I was behind you, watching us both walking up this street, going who knows where, splashing, holding hands. You loved splashing.

I remember thinking, when I woke up, rummaging for a pen to commit the dream to paper, how often I'd put out my hand for you to hold, only to find you not there, for my hand to close in on itself, fingernails against palm. How firm your grip had been in the dream.

People have put all kinds of meanings to it. I choose to believe all and none of them. You'd come back to me, that's all that mattered.

'The sunne may set and rise
But we contrariwise
sleepe after our short light
one everlasting night...'
                               Catullus