WATERCOLOR DREAMS

When the first two Facebook posts I read this morning were from friends recounting their exciting dreams, I was ready to go back to bed. You see, to my mind, my dreams from last night were not relatable. What’s a writer to do?

Write my own – with the outcomes I’d have preferred?

Slow dancing in your arms is possible again if there’s enough black paint to create you in your favorite suit – necktie gray and black stripes.

Hazy people somewhere in the background – in dreams I can move them here and there to fill spaces. Potted plants always giving green background to our cuddles with the music. We’re all alone in a crowd – it might be day – or night.

Blue everywhere – my sweater and my eyes that you loved, you told me many times. Bursts of bright color the pictures I talk to when I’m awake, or when I’m asleep or when I sense the rhythm of my heart talking to you.

My story of clutching glass jars full of captured bugs one you laughed at – something you never did and don’t understand. Of course we let them out – well sometimes it was too late and we made tiny bug graves for them.

Tiny graves that in reality have taken over as adult-size ones month after month and never stopping. I’m digging for friends and family in a world where physical contact is through masks and gloves, if at all. Goodbyes on paper or screen, cold imitations of the hugs we’d desperately like to share are all that’s possible.

Is it any wonder that dreams are sometimes more real than the lonely reality I’m enduring without you? Is it only in my mind, or is the sun shining just to laugh at my torment, knowing it will always be this way?

WATERCOLOR DREAMS

Watercolor, like life itself, flows onto the paper easily, but melds with existing colors to create new, more glorious ones. We learned to blend together that way, creating a loving life from the painful tatters and collective bruises we’d each brought to the story.

Now only our aging cat listens to me – but she lets the world in when she prances around the bed to wake me in the morning. I try to stay in dreams, but you slowly fade into those colors that I’ll close my eyes for tonight. I’ll be whispering our long ago memories into listening ears, while we create new, exciting plans that will dissolve when morning light illuminates a bed with only one side used.

Then, again, I’m standing in the remembered sand of my childhood beach, feeling the sun’s heat on my shoulders – heat that you created in my body with your touch is

fading, fading, fading

       until I dream paint us again tonight.