White Sunday Morning

In the early evenings, right after I get home from work, I lay on my pistachio-green couch and dream of you.

It’s a strange dream, like a trance. I can’t explain it, but it goes beyond sleep. It’s like I’m hopping into a future timeline when you’re beside me.

Where are you? I ask, and you reply, In the future.

But you’re by my side, in those moments.

I had a vision of you so clear. My lips were grazing your cheek, my tongue peeking out to give you gentle licks, and you were laughing. I was frozen with some kind of sleep paralysis; maybe the angels don’t want this to be too real, lest I start hating my reality because it doesn’t contain you.

Your dark brown hair. The way I feel what you feel when I trace my fingernails down your arms, your stomach. You shiver, shudder in delight.

And when I kiss you, it’s like an explosion of moonlight, endless moonbeams piercing my heart in that delicious way, that ecstatic way that Teresa of Avlia described the cherub impaling her soul with that divine arrow, that awesome, Godly, pointed spear.

When I saw your face, I almost cried.

It was like my heart was lurching forward, like the way a car lurches forward when you press the brakes too fast, like it trying to quantum-leap into the timeline when you and I are together.

I’ve never met you, but in my mind, you tell me that we’ve brushed shoulders back when I was twenty.

Three years ago. I wonder where I was.

It was my first spiritual awakening. That summer, my grandpa died the day after my twentieth birthday. I hadn’t believed in God since I was fourteen. My face was streaked with the mud of sadness and angst. But when I heard my grandpa’s voice in my mind, met him in my dreams, and felt his spirit guiding me — I knew I had to believe.

It was indubitable.

Just like you.

The numbers of my life align perfetly, the way all the planets and stars do once in a blue moon. Saturn returns to the spot where I was born. Something tells me we share the same birthday. Both born at the end of May, the cusp between cool spring and cruel summer.

In my dream, I met you at a Mexican cafe. I noticed when you walked in, immediately, but I kept my cool and ignored you.

You have dark hair. A black t-shirt with a v-neck that shows a bit of your chest. A wolfish grin that sets off that intense authenticity living deep within your eyes.

I want to cry out for you. I want you to be beside me right now.

But I also know: I must learn to be alone.

When I’m with someone, romantically, they become the joy of my life. They become an all-consuming yolk of sun within my chest. All else feels grey and drab. My thoughts are constantly filled with them. Everything I do is because I’m with them, or because I’m without them. And I don’t want to be like that with you.

In my dream, we were in a hotel bathroom, goofing about in our naked bodies. You were cracking jokes, one by one, like Easter eggs, and singing all the while. I was grumpy, but you grabbed my hands and swung me around and around, like a little princess, and I couldn’t help but smile. When I told you that I didn’t want to be with you lest you become my only source of joy, that I would be sad if you weren’t around, you simply laughed and said: Life is full of joys and sorrows anyway. You’d be honored to be my source of joy. And I’d be able to handle the sadness; I’d been dealing with it my whole life. Didn’t I want to be with you?

Of course I want to be with you. But I can’t, not right now. Not when I need to climb through the windows of this big house where my dream resides. Not until I’ve made some progress, something I can share with you. Something concrete, about my career, that says: I’ve made it. Or at least: I’m truly on the path of making it.

But I also know: that is a vanity. I want you to be by my side on this journey of mine. Wouldn’t it be great if you were with me all along?

But I also worry: if you were with me, I’d want to be with you all the time. Slowly neglect my own dreams to sit next to you on the couch, cuddling endlessly, kissing endlessly, joining to become one, endlessly.

In this world, this reality, I wonder: what are you doing right now? Where are you? Are you in Los Angeles, too? Are you thinking of me? Am I in your dreams as you are in mine? And most of all: did you see the way I smiled at you, eyes closed and lips curved, when we were laying face-to-face on the pillows that white Sunday morning? Because I did. For a split second, in my dream, I saw myself through your eyes. And I thought I was the most beautiful woman in the world.