In the corner of a dream

I have thought of you every single day that you have been absent from my life. Every single day. Sometimes not for long, often not with kindness or tenderness, but I have thought of you. Is that love? Is that enduring love? Do I still love you? Or is it just like a flesh wound that heals into a scar? There is evidence of it, it is indelible, but it is gone, the pain is gone.

The love that I had for you has been replaced and upgraded, someone else took your position and did it better. They put their hands where your hands had been, they put your lips where yours had kissed and those kisses weren't poisoned. In fact, the love that I received in return for my own was a new and startling revelation: the idea that you could love somebody and them not be unpleasant to you in exchange was life changing. And yet still there you still are, in a corner of a dream, appearing when I least expect it.

Sometimes there has been pain, real pain that I can’t get rid of for hours, day and I am left with you in my head all night. Sometimes it is that dream, the old dream, that you are out of reach, just out of grasp, and I have to get to you. Sometimes you just appear at work or in my house and I have to ask you to leave. In waking life when I try and recall you, always your face is fuzzy, your features blurred and I can’t completely recall your voice, but in my dreams you are as real and solid as you were that first night, unchanged, young again.