Chris came back and we had sex. “This is different. You’re different. Were you even enjoying yourself?” he asked me. “Yes…sort of. My head is preoccupied with thoughts. You’re here. And my life is different.” I replied. “Would you rather I didn’t come back?” he asked. “Absolutely no. I’d rather you be here. I just have to figure out what that means and looks like in this current life. You’ve been gone for a while.” I replied with these words still in my mouth as I woke from the dream. I laid there, blinking at the ceiling trying to decipher it. I tend to wake from such dreams with various emotions, mostly sadness..some times anger. This time I am filled with sadness and fear. I think about how maybe if he came back it’s him that wouldn’t want to be here with me.

I’m not the person I was when he was here.

There seems to be a growing trend with friends and acquaintances where sometime between forty five and fifty years of age, the male in the relationship decides he doesn’t want to be married anymore. They have up and left to be alone or (most often) to be with another woman. They’ve left marriages that at least from everyone else’s point of view look like perfectly happy marriages. I know at least two women who never saw it coming. They thought all was fine and then Bam! The spouse tells them they’ve been unhappy for years. Years! So there’s a part of me that wonders if Chris would have grown weary with me. I can’t imagine it, but there’s a lot of situations that I couldn’t have imagined that I am now living. I look across the bedroom at a picture of the two of us when we were in Oregon and the look on Chris’s face tells me that he would never, ever leave on his own accord.

But….

There is no What-If game to play here. There is no possibility of “coming back” for Chris. Yet I still have these dreams that hint of the possibility that one day, he’s going to just walk through the front door with the expectation that everything is as it was when he left eleven years ago. So much is so different. The walls are not even the same colors that they were when he left. His office has been taken over by another to be used as a bedroom. Though it is just as cluttered and messy as when it was his office. The dog is different. There’s a cat now too and two humans. It is no wonder I was preoccupied with thoughts because I would have to figure out how to reorganize all of this, how to tell the other people living in the house. I am sure that this is what I was thinking while dreaming. I’ve learned to live without him. I’d have to relearn how to live with him.

“Would you rather I didn’t come back?”

My answer remains the same because I know that when he asks that Chris is not speaking about the physical real world. He is talking about the worlds that exist behind closed eyelids in that space of deep sleep. If this is all I get, then yes, yes, a thousand times yes, don’t ever stop coming back. If I cannot laugh with you on this plane of existence, let me laugh with you in our dreams. Let me kiss and touch you. Let me argue with you and get frustrated with you. Let me be filled with joy as I see your face. If this is the only way, then this is the only way. Next time I promise to not be preoccupied or hesitant. I promise to be fully present in your visit with a full knowledge that they are short and fleeting.

But hopefully, never ending.