"Down to my deepest depths I peered"

Periodically, I dream of you. In my dreams you are much like you appear in real-life, but softer and yet more intense, because in my dreams it is always just the two of us and we are perfectly in sync. Everything in my dreams becomes mixed: so the scene in Middlesex with the bed becomes a party heap of bodies and me waking to the crook of your arm and the back of your neck. I would never be so bold, never be so blind, and yet in my dream I rest my head there for a few minutes and what I feel – is an anchorless forever, what I distrust – is everything else. Last night you pulled away in the kindest possible way, and I felt my heart give like water through your fingers. You put your lips to my ear and whispered something secret; a powerful arching sentiment of reasonableness; ‘you know that we…..’ and I heard, but still I gripped your arm and still I breathed through my nose and felt the rise-and-fall of all the brushed aside promises which reached for me in the final moments of them living. I had two more dreams afterwards, where I was on a boat. Twice I came close to drowning. Before I was freed the second time, before I sat beside you on the middle deck, shivering with the mute cold of dream chills and acceptance, I felt the call of dying recede into that collage of senses and the mindpull of unreality sink my heart like nothing ever could.