I’ve been slack, I know. I’ve been meaning to write but, you know. Things just happened. I posted something two months ago, did you get it? Did it come through? I was wondering only because I hadn’t heard from you for so long. When was the time I last visited?
Something happened just like I said it would, just like the very precise fear that gripped me, seemingly forever, the fear that something, anything, bad would happen. But that when it happened I wouldn’t even notice, being preoccupied with what could have been.
As I said, something happened. Someone stole your passport. Really. Someone climbed in through the window and took the very last thing here that proved you were who you had been up until that moment. Is it a touch too much to say that it actually set you free?
I went to the Embassy and they erased every memory of your identity and what happened to it, wiped out any claim the local police might have made over what happened. I simply told them that someone really climbed in through the window and stole what set you free.
You’ll see. It set you free because now you’re me. I got us both a new ID when I changed my name to ‘Dr D.’. At least in my head, when it happened. In fact, I was already a doctor on the plane. I’d left my troubles behind in my head long before anything happened.
Even when nothing happened. In the time immediately after I lost you only to buy you back once again, I said nothing, because nothing had to happen. Nothing had to, anymore, because of you, and who you grew into. I’m speaking of me. I’m speaking of the we that’s also she.
She is the best excuse I have for not writing you more often. She knows me, knows what it feels like to say simply that you’re afraid something bad might happen, when it already has, and you weren’t afraid then. She’s never afraid to laugh. Come back to me, then.
Come back to me, then, she says. Just drop whatever it is that you’re doing and come directly here at once. Don’t hesitate, even when something’s happening. Things happen. It’s not really a secret. It’s really not even happening, actually. Things have a habit.
And that’s happening.
But what’s happening is hard to put into your words. It’s hard to hear you from here, after all that’s happened. I miss your spontaneity. Your jokes were like therapy to me. I miss your hands that held me, in the dark. You are long gone from me. Let us never speak of it again.
Here you are, in me. Kicking against the rib-cage of me, circling the vultures hovering over my imaginary body, to which nothing ever happens, not even accidentally. In this imaginary body, where nothing actually happens at all. Well, at least not to me.
So, I’ve been slack. I’ve been feeling the lack of you, faraway from me like a surfer without the sound the sea makes in her. This could be the last time I write for a while, actually. Unless I receive something positive in receipt. You know, like nice feelings, or something?
Anyway, get back to me.
Doctor Davey “Dreamnation”, BA (Hons), MA, PhD.
