“Things might have been different, but they could not have been better.”
JRR Tolkien

There’s a recurring dream I have where, in a panic, I am searching for you.

These dreams are unlike the rest.  Some dreams have felt like a visitation; these ones though, these take on a different kind of texture: a rougher one. 

There’s a tension and a static in them, and I wake up more in a state of anxiety than peace.  

In the last five years, I have learned that these stress dreams are common among grievers.  

Apparently, many of us search for our loved ones in the only place where we can meet our thoughts on their own terms: in our sleep.  And sometimes,  we actually find our loved ones hidden in a deep recess of our dream world. 

In the last five years, I have found you, held you, and woken up time and time again clinging to pieces of you that I ripped from dreams.

I never know what to expect during these encounters: Sometimes, I see you from a distance.  Other times, you are up close and offer explanations for why you’ve been gone for so long.  

There are a few times where the version of you I find is angry and wants to be left alone.  

My friend thinks this happens because our human minds are never able to process and accept losing someone to death.  After five years, I have to say that I think he is right.  Though everyone is, in a sense, made to die, I don’t think we were made to be left behind.  I just don’t think humans are cut out for that kind of separation from one another. 

If it wasn’t for the fact that the five years I’ve spent mourning you are somehow still better years than the ones I had before I met you, I don’t think I would have been able to put one foot in front of the other. I certainly would not have gotten through that first year and been able to take those initial steps or breaths in a world in which you didn’t exist anymore.

The last five years have shown me that there’s a hidden power in that paradox: that the same love which can unmake us also can sustain us.  I can’t figure out if it’s the most beautiful or most tragic part of being human.

On those mornings where I find myself being pulled from a dream-world where you still exist into this world where you do not, I struggle to remember the details of this life: the one I have lived in the half decade since you died. On those mornings, my real life is the one that feels surreal.

Sometimes, I have to recite the names of friends and memories and experiences like they’re the beads on a rosary.

It’s like a litany of the years: All the new people and moments that have mattered, that have helped me. All the ways I have changed more into the image of the person you always saw when you looked at me.

I list the people you never met, places you didn’t get to go, the plans I have coming up, and I call myself back into this life.  

Nothing is too big or too small to mention:  I remind myself about the coffee date I have next week with a friend.  The workout I did yesterday where I felt my legs giving out and my lungs exploding.  The conversation I had at work with a colleague.  The phone date I’m supposed to have with my friend next Saturday morning.  

And then I say your name and tell you “good morning.”

Five years later, I still see you in dreams, and I still speak to you when I wake up. 

I still tell you things.   

I guess this is why some people think that all these years later I have lost my mind.

If I’m perfectly honest: they’re right. I did lose it.  

In the years since your accident, I have felt my entire mind and all my ways of thinking and all of my assumptions and all of my beliefs shatter and shake and slip away.  All that I had built for myself was lost when you were.  

Even my mind.  

What good would it have done me to have kept it?  

What good would it have done to have kept a mind that believed I was strong enough to overcome anything life threw at me. Even you were wrong about how strong I was; you told me once that I would always come back stronger in the face of hardship. Well, I didn’t. Not in the face of this.

There was no getting up from this.  

I know you couldn’t have known that when you were alive; there was no way you could have known that you would be the key to my undoing.  Or that I’d lose my mind after you.  That I was nowhere near as strong as you believed.  

The five years have shown me that you were wrong about me.

But you also had always told me I had a good heart. I never really knew what you meant, but I think I do now. In the last five years I have seen that my heart, though it wasn’t always in the right place when you knew me, still did what hearts were made to do…to love beyond themselves.

So you were right about me too.

Once again, there’s a power in that paradox somewhere, but it’s one that, five years later, I still struggle to put into words.