Red Messenger

I dream of you, oddly, profoundly. I dream of you so often I wonder if you’ve hired a master of the occult to open up my head like a music box and fill it to the brim with locks of your hair. Wind the key and my mind plays a slow, sombre version of your favorite tune.

In my dream, you lie with me in a dark field in a country with no name. To be fair: Not precisely you, but the “idea of you.” The idea of you has no hair, no hands, and no eyes that I can remember upon waking. The idea of you is a messily blurred body and a scratched-out face. But the idea of you can take on a shape like a fully grown stallion and easily outcompete all opponents on the track, finishing the race with no ounce of visible effort, gleaming like the reflection of the pale moon. The idea of you is fearless before the Sunday morning derby crowds that rise to celebrate you. From the stands, I sob with terrifying, newly discovered emotion.

In the real world, the world of the living, you move around like a blood cell. Fast, energetic, determined, accomplished, self-assured. A vessel of purpose. I wish I had your single-mindedness. I wish I had your verve. You swim so easily through the crowded channels of the green, gray, blue world. I watch you from faraway, from my vantage point in a high tower. I see you refracted through social media; a professional face, front-lit, with an ironed collar beneath. I see you in the colorful stories that come back to me from our mutual friends. I read your turn-of-phrase in a thick book on the library shelf. I heed the advice you gave me years ago. Your eyes roll at me from the big screen of a matinee showing of your favorite film. I go through my inbox and find a years-old email from your old address. I see your features on a stranger’s face. I look at the sky at dusk—purple, pink, black, rose-red—and think that only you would have known the word to describe this color. I click through photographs on a forgotten hard drive and notice you smiling shyly in the background. I have to avert my eyes. Do you ever see me, in memory, in mood-altering dream? We understand each other, you and I. Don’t we? Didn’t we?

What a joy companionship is; what a liability, when it is lost. A bonfire dwindling to nothing, rendering the dark of the forest full and all-encompassing. A delicately crafted glass vial of poison, imbibed at the tragic end of a play. When I tell the story of my life, I can’t bear to completely omit you, but I am careful to limit the extent of your role. I don’t think I could take questions without releasing a torrent of intolerable feelings. Fossilized in a previous stage of life, I am a scarab, legs folded underneath me, buried deep in sand, and the moon, red and full, rises with no knowledge of me.