the beach

I kept teleporting between Berlin and New York City, finding each altered slightly from how I remembered, but still recognizable in an all-encompassing way. Back in Berlin I visited my first apartment building there, the one that he had helped me move into. Its entire facade had changed. I snuck into the building and was exploring the lower level in the rear as opposed to the front, where my apartment stood.

I was moving very quietly around the staircase, hoping to go undetected, but certainly overcompensating the stealthiness. Though silent, I made large and unnatural steps– as though I had completely forgotten how I once moved when I belonged there. 

My efforts were in vain. Two old ladies opened a door a couple feet away from me one level down. They asked me in German what I was doing there, and if I had an access card for the building. There was no hostility in their voices. I admitted that I didn’t have one, that I used to live there, and that back in those days, no card was ever needed. They assured me that I could come back and hang out with them upon obtaining a card of my own. 

From what I could see through the opened door, the apartment was very welcoming in a tacky antique grandma kinda way–frilly baby-pink lace doilies and ugly mint-green chairs stunted forever in their plastic– such that their surprise offer actually enticed me. I really wanted to get in there and shoot the shit with them sometime. Like a good rule-abiding German citizen, I took my cue and snuck back out of the building.

Outside was New York City again, on what must’ve been July 4th. The sun had set and people were shooting fireworks, dressed in summer clothes. I found myself on the beach (also altered slightly) where he, some friends, and I always celebrated the holiday. I sat on a bench and watched the sky darken parallel to the fireworks. 

I had my legs extended out to the side of the bench, when someone awkwardly walking his bike through the sand ran over my foot. It broke my firework hypnosis and I snapped at him immediately.

“Hey, you just ran over my foot,” I said. 

The guy turned around as I spoke. I got a good look at him as he kept walking away: it was him. Of course it was. I had not seen or heard from him in over a year, at my own request. I watched his brows lift to incredulity and a smile form across the face that I once knew so well. It was like witnessing his sinuses finally re-open after spending a year in dormancy. I think my ears deafened for a moment and my own face felt drowned in a sudden warmth.

He wore a grey t-shirt with some graphic design on it, and his stupid detachable-at-the-knee darker grey cargo pants were, in fact, detached. His blond hair was at a shortish-medium length that I deemed barely admissible (he’d never leave his hair as long as I liked it to be). 

He started walking back over to me. He was joined by a girl around our age, with dirty-blonde hair. They looked like they could’ve been related–he’d always wanted me to know that he wasn’t into blondes, or girls that resembled him– but I intuited immediately that this was the new girl he’d been seeing. She waited for him several feet away. I think she also understood who I was. 

I forget what he first said when he approached, maybe he asked what I was doing there. I dissociated a little and felt like I was watching this interaction–which I had only ever rehearsed in dreams, with varying and inconclusive results–occur from outside my body. What is the correct way to manage brushing elbows with the former center of your universe?

There was always a lot of ambiguity and anxiety around what bumping into him could entail for me. Would he be happy to see me? Distressed? Indifferent? Would I be able to hold my own, as an entirely new version of myself? Would I now be impervious to his usual manipulation tactics? Would he still use the old techniques? Would he even say anything at all? I think I manifested this meeting into finally happening, both accidentally and on purpose.

We both looked off to the side and saw the girl still waiting there. He and I looked at each other. He went over to tell her something and I think she said she would be waiting for him somewhere else. 

While he spoke to her, I found that a cupboard had materialized beside the bench I was on. Wanting to shrink in size, I opened it and squeezed myself in there like a cat. He followed me in, which unfortunately delighted me. I always wanted him to follow me into the cupboard.

He closed the cabinet behind him, but the space was so constricting that he had to get on top of me in order for us both to be in there. I was okay with it because it kind of felt like visiting home, so long as you forcibly ignored that this home was more like a dilapidated, abandoned house one creak away from swinging a nail-embedded floorboard into your head and slowly brutalizing you.

“You ruined everything for me,” I told him. I started crying almost instantly.

“I love you, I’ve always loved you,” he said.

He gave me a kiss, which I half-accepted. It was like kissing a corpse. I felt nothing but the sense that I was getting that girl’s residue on me.

I could still hear the fireworks outside.

“No, you don’t love me and you never have. I have never been loved by you,” I informed him. 

Fully choked up, I said, “I don’t know how to escape this prison that you created for me.” 

He was thinking about how to reply to that. He couldn’t. I woke up, with a nasty desperation to re-enter the exchange, and was left short yet again.