The Memory of Dream

I had another dream about Paul. I have been “awake” for so long that most of it has faded to just flashes of images that linger with a small memory. I am not always able to recall the images of a dream but rather the emotions I felt and the feelings that remain with me throughout the day.

In this dream, we were in love. It was different than most of the dreams I have with him. I usually find myself trying to get his attention or finding myself running around trying to save him. He is avoiding me which usually makes me feel the same way I did when we were together. I feel it is my subconscious mind manifesting an image of him while I sleep because I am feeling insecurities while I am awake.

However, last night was different. It was as if he came to console me. He was there for me and he loved the way he did way back when. In the beginning, the beginning where everything felt whole. In the beginning where we were so young that our love was the purest love of all. The love that had yet to be tainted by the thoughts and opinions of others and the time we spent alone was the best time of our life.

I know he felt the same way. I know this because we always talked about how our love for each other was like nothing either of us had ever been able to find again on this Earth.

But…

“Time” changed us. Experiences sent us in different directions and that deep feeling of love for one another soon transformed. The boy I had fell in love with became a man. A man much different than the boy I had fallen madly in love with. The truth was, I was MADLY in love with him. It was a circus ring of emotions and as teenagers that were experiencing love like that for the first time, it was…expansive and explosive.

It will be 5 years since he passed away this April, and despite how big and deep of a hole I dig inside of myself and no matter how much dirt I pile on top of the memories… I still cannot seem to bury these emotions deep enough. They always resurface. He finds a way to live on in my dreams. I don’t seem to have much control over how or when or even what will happen when I see him again but I always seem him again. I find comfort in the pain. But it isn’t until the moment I wake up that I realize it was all just a dream and he dies all over again.

I spend the whole day grieving the death of man I couldn’t love…and remembering a boy who still has pieces of my heart.

Paul, and I meet when we were thirteen year old. Well, the truth is we didn’t meet…I saw him off in the distance at one of his football games in Junior High and within one single pivotal moment in time everything that I had ever known shifted and all I could think of was him.

I had heard of the expression “love at first sight,’ but I was thirteen and I had a lifetime of people to see so, how could this be happening to me?

I sit here now and reminisce on all of the memories (the ones I can remember) of the life I spent with him. I feel the tears as they stream down my face and the warmth they give as they fall down onto the bed. There is only one moment in my life that I ask myself, “what if?”

In truth, I am not someone who lives with regret and I truly believe that whatever happens is what happened. We judge it subjectively and we make choices in a moment and we have to live with those choices. But with Paul, it is all different. I always wonder what it would have been like if he didn’t leave me.

I swallow as the tears begin to flood my eyes and my vision becomes distorted. I wipe them away as some of his memory fades.

I begin thinking that…

If he stayed…“What would have happened to all the memories I had that were so pure and the ones that I based everything I knew about love off of?”

As the years went on and Paul and I went our separate ways, I was able to see him change. I saw a boy I once loved become a man. This man he was becoming caused the boy that once lived within him to disappear. It was as if his soul was being covered by this person he was creating. This person that was slowly killing the boy within, that I once adored and loved.

When I think back on our short lived time together as teenagers I am reminded that we spent a lot of time apart after our break up. We went different paths along our journeys and my heart couldn’t seem to find a way back to him.

I remember a few years after out final break up he came to see me. He stood tall in the doorway as I let him in and felt something unlike what I felt in the past. An absence of emotion. He was high and I could see the drugs had taken over. I could see it on his face. He was standing there with his body but he wasn’t in there. I let him in and moments later I found myself in his loving embrace as we laid on the couch together sharing our memories of the past. The truth was, I had moved on and the feelings that I once felt were no longer there.

I stayed in his arms knowing it was over.

A couple hours went by as it was time for him to go. He stood in the doorway and said, “I love you. Let’s get out of here. Together. Let’s just go. You and I. I don’t have to go back to Florida. We can stay together.” I looked at him, felt nothing and knew I had to let him go. I don’t remember to this day what I said but I remember that was the last time I saw him for years to come.

I closed the door to a memory of a boy I once loved and the memories of a man I try to forget.

The addiction had gotten the better parts of him. And for me…the addiction was destroying the memories of the life we once lived and one I once loved.

I often times think, “What would have become of my minds memories of us if he was still alive? Who would I be without these memories? Would everything have changed if I watched him live his life, get married, have kids and love another woman the way I wanted him to love me? Would he have found sobriety or would the addiction have destroyed him alongside every cherished memory I had lingering around inside of me?”

What his life and death has meant to me is greater than anything I have experienced here on Earth. The day he left he took pieces of me with him.

I remember the day I got the news. I was standing on the rocky road leading up to the cabin in the mountains were my boyfriend Vitaliy at the time had brought me for a weekend get away. I had barely any service and yet one messaged managed to get through. I looked down to read the message from my sister Colleen, “Paul is dead?”

I stopped breathing. I felt apart of my soul escaping from my body and all the weight I was carrying drop to the ground as the tiny rocks dug into my body reminding me I was still alive. I grabbed a handful in my fist and squeezed it tightly. “This can not be real,” I thought to myself. I called one of my best friends to confirm that the biggest fear of my life had come true.

The addiction had taken the boy I loved and killed a man I barely knew.

All I have left are the memories and my dreams with him inside of them. He is always the boy I once loved and the one I am trying to save. He comes to me and it all feels so real. It is as if he never truly died but the addiction took his body and left a part of his soul inside of me.

He lives on in my mind. He exists within my dreams. He is still apart of me.

Memories that grew from Love.