comedy and drama

The dreams started after everything fell apart. Not before. I know that’s true, because they didn’t feel like dreams. They felt real. Too real to just wake up and forget about, unfolding in what looked like little pictures. Little pictures that I had painted. Pictures of things I had seen before.

The time when I was awake began to feel less and less real. The days passed too slowly. I would lay in my bed while it was bright out and wait for sleep to come, so we could be together again. In my vintage dreams, she was more alive than people who stood in front of me. I was only happy in sleep. That haunted me. Maybe they were more like nightmares.

Silent nightmares.

Home is where the hot wind blows, where most girls are married by twenty-two, and where one person in thirty-eight lives in a trailer. Most people don’t have high school diplomas. There has been no rain since April.

Sometimes, when I've dried out, she does get back in. She likes to remind me that I didn't see myself ending up back here.

"I tried to run away" I tell her.

I did. I tried hard to drift far away from this heat and the past. I swear, I would have made it if it wasn't for those dreams. I would have made it, if I just didn't look back. I would have made it, if it wasn't for her.

...

I wasn't drunk the night I ended things, but I can't remember how I did it.

I know I said stupid things like I hoped that we could be friends. She said he didn’t think that would happen, that she couldn’t just be my friend. I know she asked me to reconsider, and I said I’d done a lot of considering. She said that she knew things were bad and that I wasn’t happy with her like I used to be, but that she wanted to try harder.

I said I didn’t think it was a problem that trying could fix.

I think eventually I said that we were just too different and that we had to go be different, apart.

She thought our differences were what made us special.

We talked late into the darkness. Eventually there wasn’t anything more to say. We both lay in the bed, not touching, not sleeping, not speaking. I heard my heart beating. I could hear her heart beating. We didn’t move from the bed until long after the sun rose.

I don’t remember saying goodbye.

I haven’t seen her since.

The rain always reminds me of that night.