I dread the night.
It's not that darkness frightens me, but because darkness remembers.
The setting sun feels less like the end of a day and more like the opening of an old wound. As the sky bleeds into shades of violet and black, I find myself delaying the inevitable. I busy my hands with meaningless things. I read another page. I watch another hour pass. I pace the room. Anything to postpone the moment my head finally meets the pillow.
Because I know what waits for me...I know who waits for me.
The silence grows heavier with every passing minute until it settles around my shoulders like a familiar cloak. My bedroom is no longer just a room. It becomes a doorway. A threshold between the life I live and the one I can only visit after surrendering to sleep.
Then I close my eyes. And there you are. Never late. Never early. Always waiting.
My beautiful curse.
You haunt my dreams with a tenderness crueler than any nightmare.
You stand exactly as I remember you. The same eyes that once searched mine as though they were reading a language only they could understand. The same smile that softened every hard edge inside me. You never speak immediately. You simply look at me, as though we've only been apart for a few hours instead of an eternity.
For those precious moments, I forget that I ever lost you.
You walk toward me without hesitation, as though distance has never existed between us. When your hand finds mine, it fits with the painful familiarity of something that has always belonged there. Your fingers lace through mine with practiced ease, and I remember.
I remember that they have held me before, I remember the comfort of your embrace. The quiet conversations spoken without words. The safety I once found beneath your touch.
Nothing in these dreams feels imagined...it is all remembered.
I hear you whisper my name as though it was made only for your lips. Every syllable wraps itself around my soul until I no longer know whether my heart beats for me or for you. If this is madness, then let me lose every fragment of reason. I would listen to your voice for eternity if it meant hearing my name spoken the way you do.
Sometimes we don't speak at all. We simply exist together.
You brush a loose strand of hair behind my ear and just look at me. You laugh softly at something I cannot remember saying. We walk through places that do not exist, yet somehow feel more like home than the life waiting for me beyond morning.
In those dreams there is no goodbye. No ending. No reason to question why we ever drifted apart. There is only us.
The version of us the night is kind enough to preserve. Perhaps that is why waking hurts so much.
Because for a few stolen hours, I am allowed to believe that nothing was ever broken.
Then morning comes.
I wake with tears already spilling down my face, reaching across cold sheets that have never known your body. The silence is deafening. The room is empty. You are gone, as though dawn steals you away before I can beg you to stay.
Every morning I mourn someone who has not disappeared from the world...Only from mine.
What a cruel existence, to fall asleep in anticipation and wake in grief.
Yet every evening I return to this bed willingly. I smooth the pillow beneath my head like a sacred ritual. I welcome the darkness because somewhere beyond it, you are waiting for me.
Perhaps I am no longer sleeping.
Perhaps I am simply visiting the only place where our souls are still allowed to find one another.
And oh...
How I ache for the day you stop haunting my dreams and begin haunting my reality.
The day I wake with your arms wrapped around me instead of memories.
The day your heartbeat replaces the echo of my own.
Until then, I will keep returning to the only place that has ever been merciful enough to give you back to me.
Every night, I lose myself just to find you.
Every morning, I find myself only to lose you again.
My haunted love.