Lucid Moon Dreaming

I took the breakup and the divorce harder than anything else I’ve lived through. Harder than the beatings, harder than failing school, harder than watching my mother stab my stepfather, harder than the week I slept on the street. It still shocks me to say it: twenty years with a psychopath, and the end of that family cut deeper. The lucid dreaming began after the happiness broke. I had been in Canada a year. I married. For a while everything was real and bright. I won’t retell how it fell apart; that story exists elsewhere. What matters here is what came after. For eighteen years the dreams returned, again and again, with a clarity that felt like another life. I’d flown before, replayed violent fragments at sixteen, known ordinary nightmares. These were different: sharp, immediate, impossible to dismiss. They held you in the way memory holds a photograph. They are beautiful and they are cruel. Beautiful because they bring me back to the first time we met, to the small mercies and the way your laugh fit the room. Cruel because I wake and find it was only a dream. Beautiful because your blue eyes in those nights are so vivid they hurt. Cruel because the perfume you wore lingers in my nose for days, as if the scent has been grafted to my skin.