The Dream

I have this recurring dream where I get a phone call that tells me I’m going to die that day, and the rest of the dream is me trying, and failing, to get to someone I love. The person I’m trying to reach changes. Sometimes it’s my sister, sometimes my mom, sometimes a friend. Sometimes it’s someone I haven’t spoken to in years. The only consistency is that I never make it in time. Death finds me before I find them, and I wake with a frantic ache in my chest that doesn’t ease even when I reassure myself that I (probably) won’t die that day.

I never call them. The person I was trying to reach, I mean. When I wake up and realize that the person I was so desperate to reach just a moment ago is now only a phone call away, I just sit there by myself. I don’t want to burden them with my problems—not when the problem is as trivial as a dream. And I know that I’ll see them soon. If I want to. And once it’s clear that time won’t end that night, the intensity of the day fades. It’s just one more bead threaded onto a long string. It doesn’t need to be painted in bold, vivacious strokes.

But tonight the dream is different. Because when I get the call, I remember that I’ve had this dream before. I remember the gunman that kept me from my sister, the car accident on the way to see my mom, the earthquake that split the ground in two when I was about to reach my friend. I remember the chase, and how it always ends. So when I get the call, I don’t feel the usual spike of fear. I just feel tired. And I wish that I could choose a different fate tonight.

“Bad call?”

My heart jumps. I know the voice, but I don’t turn to look. He’s never been in my dreams before. Certainly not in this one.

“Was that your mom?”

I wonder what would happen if I broke all the rules. I already know that I’m in a dream. I don’t have to bow down to social conventions. I can ignore people when I’m spoken to. I can avoid eye contact when I’m uncomfortable. I can say what I’m thinking, even if it’s rude. I can stare if I want to.

I can stare if I want to.

It’s this thought that finally makes me turn.

He looks just like he used to, though I know he would probably look different now. Maybe he’s pierced his ears in the last two years. Cut his brown hair shorter. Donated that stained flannel that I always hated but has somehow wound up here, in the supposed security of my subconscious. I wrinkle my nose, and raise my gaze from his shirt to his face. Which is open and smiling. Which is tan and freckled. Which has a scar from when he stapled his face and a mole below the left corner of his lip. Which pinches in confusion as I openly study him, but the happiness doesn’t dim. And I feel my heart flutter involuntarily.

“What?” he asks, smiling.

“What?” I ask, oblivious, because it’s my dream, and I can be obtuse if I want to.

He laughs and loops an arm over my shoulders, and I take a deep inhale, dragging in the scent of him. And I secretly wish he hasn’t donated the flannel.

“Come on,” he says, “Let’s go get coffee.”

We walk out of my apartment, though maybe it’s our apartment, here. I scan the place before I close the door behind me, looking for signs of him. The furniture is the same, if not a little more worn. The kitchen is the same, but there’s a pot in the sink. There are only a few signs that he lives there—just a pair of shoes, a discarded jacket, a handful of pictures—but he feels imprinted in the walls. I know that this is ours. And it’s probably just the dream, but the place feels a little warmer.

I close the door.

He takes my hand and leads me to the coffee shop across the street—the one we went to, once, the day I moved here. I haven’t been back since, and my heart always squeezes when I pass it, but now he leads me toward the door with ease. Like we’ve done this dozens of times. And a part of my soul unravels.

The door jingles when it opens. We walk to the cashier and he orders for me, and I swell with the knowledge that he remembers my order. Then it occurs to me that here, he never had a reason to forget.

We walk to a table and sit in silence. Him with an amused smirk, me with a knot of anxiety. He seems to know that I’m thinking something, and he waits for me to say what it is. He always did that, I remember, Wait for me.

“Lewis,” I say.

“Clara,” he says. He grins. I frown. This is serious, my frown says. He frowns too, matching my expression, but the amusement doesn’t leave his eyes. It almost makes me laugh.

“What if I told you that I was going to die today?” I ask him.

He arches a brow, still unserious. “Why?” he asks, “Do you know something I don’t?”

I scowl. He was always joking, I think, He never took me seriously.

Though, that isn’t fair. He was serious when he needed to be—when I needed him to be. But he would always joke when faced with my anxiety. And I had liked that, hadn’t I? Liked that he was light enough to bouy me when I was sinking. Liked that he saw what I was feeling and knew to unravel it rather than acknowledge it. Liked that it had worked, most of the time, and I was never as anxious when I was with him.

Some of the tension in me eases, replaced with an ache, and I find myself smiling at him.

“Okay,” I amend, “What if I told you that you were going to die today?”

“Me?” he asks.

“You,” I confirm. “What would you do?”

He pauses, and I like that he’s considering this. Like that he’s treating a hypothetical as a genuine question, and that he wants to give me a genuine answer.

He nods to himself and stands from the table, extending a hand to me. “Why don’t I show you?” he asks. And my heart swells and I think, maybe this isn’t that bad of a dream.

I expect him to lead me to the car. Maybe we’ll go to the beach, I think with a thrill, or maybe to the city. We can’t go to his family—they’re all in Ohio, where he is in real life. I think of all the dreams where I was running through the airport, trying to catch a plane to see my dad.

That’s probably what he would do if he really believed this was his last day, I think to myself, Try to get on a plane to see his family. And the thought makes me ache.

But he doesn’t lead me to the car. He takes me back to the apartment. He opens the door and sets the keys in a dish and tells me to sit on the couch. He turns on the TV and washes the pot and ignores me as I gawk at him. When he’s done with the dishes, he returns to the couch, and I think maybe now we’ll leave, but instead he pulls his phone from his pocket.

“Alright,” he says, “What’s the starting word?”

I blink. “What?”

He flashes the phone to me, and I see that Wordle is on the screen. My confusion grows, but my lips curl into an unbidden smile. I loved doing the Wordle with him.

“How about, ‘death?’”

He shakes his head. “That’s morbid, Johnson.”

But he plugs it in and informs me that the ‘E’ is in word, but not in that space. It takes us three more tries before we guess the correct word: ‘lover.’ Which I think is a little on the nose, even for my subconscious, but when he looks at me with a smirk, I find that I don’t really mind. And I like the next activity even more than the first.

After, we walk to the park. We sit and make up stories for passersby, and I blush when I accidentally guess a name correctly and a woman pauses to talk to us. He just laughs into his hand, and I hit his arm when she leaves.

We eat lunch at a sandwich shop downtown, and we order extra-large sodas because “It’s my last day, after all.” We go shopping and I make him try on flannels, but I quietly rejoice when he refuses to buy any. We go to a costume shop and he buys a bright-pink boa for me, and I buy a top hat from him, and we wear them the rest of the day and whenever anyone speaks to us, we adopt increasingly ridiculous accents. We watch the sunset between the buildings, and when I confess that I used to climb trees when I was young so I could watch the sunset better, we race back to the park so we can climb a tree now. I’m too scared to climb past the first branch, and once the sun goes down and darkness settles, I’m too scared to get back down. We stay in the tree, giggling and hiding from anyone who walks by, until my legs go numb and he hops down and carries me to the ground.

We walk home, and I know that the dream is almost over. I know that I’ll die soon, or I’ll wake up, and either way this charade will end. And even though I’ve had years to grieve this, years to grieve him, somehow it still hurts.

“Lewis,” I say, “Is this really how you would spend your last day?”

He smiles at me. “Of course.”

“But we didn’t do anything,” I say.

“Sure we did,” he says.

“Nothing special,” I say.

“We did what makes me happy,” he says. “I wouldn’t want my last day to be grand. I would want it to be like the rest of my life, just the best of it. The parts I love the most.”

My heart skips a beat, but I still arch a brow. “Dan’s sandwich shop is part of what you love the most about life?”

“No,” he says, “But you are.”

And I think that this might be what kills me.

“Lewis,” I say, “Remember when I moved here?” He nods. “Remember… remember the fight we had before I left? About how I didn’t want you to quit your job and leave your family for me?” He nods again, more somber now. “What if… what if after I moved here, we had another fight. What if I insisted that I wouldn’t let you give up your life for me. What if I told you that even if you came here, even if you found a new job, even if you saw your family often, even if you were happy, that I would always be unhappy, because I would always worry I wouldn’t be enough?”

“Are you unhappy?” he asks, concerned.

I shake my head. “No,” I say, and I realize that this is true. I was happy today. But this is also a dream, and dreams are much simpler than life. “I’m just saying, what if I said all that, and what if you grew tired. What if you left?”

“I would never do that,” he says. And I squeeze my eyes shut, because he did.

“Okay. But what if you did? What if all that happened, and you left, and we broke up, and we didn’t speak for years. Would you hate me? Would you hate me for what I did to you?”

He stops walking, and he grabs me by my shoulders. “I could never hate you,” he says, “I could never stop loving you.”

I smile at him, trying to take this as a reassurance. But of course this isn’t real, and I don’t know what he would really say. It’s just that sometimes, it’s nice to dream.

A car swerves onto the sidewalk and hits me before we reach our apartment. It’s not very original, but it does the trick. The dream ends and I wake up.

I lie there for a moment, the pale light of dawn drifting in from the window. I feel hollow. Drained. Tired. I want to go back to sleep, but today is a new day, and it would be silly to ignore it. I sit up and brush my cheeks and realize that I’m crying. A small laugh escapes me, and I tell myself to get over it. I’ve had this dream many times, and this one was no different than the others. I still received a call. I still spent the day thinking about someone I love or have loved. I still died. If anything, this dream was better than the rest, because there wasn’t a chase. There wasn’t a desperation to reach someone before the time ran out. I didn’t need to run to someone. He was already there.

It’s this thought that makes me sadder than the rest. I think I might be sobbing, and I put a hand over my mouth to contain the sound. Once I’ve calmed down, I rest my head against the headboard and close my eyes.

It was nice, I think, to have lived in a dream like that, even for a little while. A dream where I could believe the best. Where the worst never happened. Where there were no rules. And it occurs to me that maybe I could let the dream stretch a little longer. Maybe I could live outside of social convention for a couple minutes more. Maybe I could call someone I’m not supposed to call.

I pick up my phone from the night stand. I stare at the blank screen for a while before I turn it on, then stare at his contact for several minutes longer. I take a breath and tell myself it’s just a dream. Then I summon my courage and press dial.

He answers on the third ring, and my heart stutters. I suddenly don’t know what I’m going to say. I haven’t spoken with him in years, and a lot could have changed since then. He’s probably moved on. He might be with someone else. He might have answered by mistake, and these few seconds of silence are him debating whether he should hang up.

“Clara?” he asks. There’s confusion in his voice, but also a hint of amusement. Something in my chest loosens, and I find myself grinning into the phone.

“Lewis.”