Is Life Not

Is life not what happens in between the tension of freedom and obligation? Sit and listen for a while as I tell you a story.

I dream that we are at the beach and I walk into the waters. It is too blissful, too free of implication, too true. I do not deserve it and neither do you. I spend my days waking next to you, working for our betterment, and then I return to that dream every night. I think it means to tell me something, but I refuse to listen. You leave one day, without telling me. We both knew it was coming, always knew it was to end this way—peace is not for us. Now I spend my days alone, standing at that same beach, and dream of us together, still working for our betterment. Sometimes I see you at the beach and you see me, but we ignore each other with studied levity. I wonder if we share our dreams, if we ever did. I like to think you do—an indulgence shared until the very end.

Our lives are ever touching, never intertwining, always parallel. We both are too strong to admit this weakness, too weak to admit this strength. We sit in bed, me on the left, you on the right, and talk about the future neither of us believes in. We hold each other, talking about those who died before they became people to us, we dream of their deaths—violent and gruesome and invariably induced by us—and awake the next morning grave with our dreams. We know, but we don’t talk as not to sully our idealisms with the reality of our emotion.