vapor

He came to me in a dream last night.
Finding him spilling out of a bar in Montreal birthed a deep bloom of happiness within me. I yelled out for him and immediately he smiled and ran towards me. We hugged and it felt exactly as I remembered. It as though the years apart never happened. (Nobody feels like the first and I don't think you can ever forget how they feel, smell).

“You look different, happier.” 

“You look exactly as I remembered,” I replied.

I broke down and told him everything he had meant to me. I had contemplated this moment so many times over the years. I admitted listening to nothing but the Pet shop boys for a year after he moved to Vancouver. How many times I had closed my eyes and relived that first night. How I wore his unwashed tshirt to bed all of those nights. How often I read and reread all of the letters he had sent to me, to find clues how he really felt. How I truly believed there would never be another that would affect me as he did. He just replied "I know" and hugged me even harder. He said he had to go and just as easy as he came into my life, he left.

I woke up feeling relieved. I had lost contact with him so many years ago and I always needed some sort of closure. We were only 19 and I had always wished we had known each other as grown men with battle wounds rather than arrogant boys who thought we owned the world.

I’ve begun to contemplate that thought which I refused to entertain for years: maybe there will never be another who I will care for that uncontrollably, so fearlessly. Maybe that’s the epitome of naivete and the most beautiful part of youth, the belief that life is an endless stream of hopeful, beautiful people anxious to love and be loved with purity.  Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden before they had ever thought of eating that fruit.  

I don’t think I’ll ever see him again, so I’m  grateful for the dream. Unlike previous meetings, this time the delight I took in him was not attached to hope, but rather, existed in a promise-less place. We didn't need to pretend we will have a future because there will never be one.(that still doesn't take away the thrill of seeing him again).