You died in my dream, and somehow I was obliged to speak at your funeral.

You would never have a funeral. I know this. You would never be there, bodily, dead, in a casket. You would have wanted your ashes scattered somewhere scenic.

Nonetheless, I stood in front of rows of folding chairs, lined up in my subconscious, whizzing along at a thousand frames per second. My dream felt slow. David was in the fifth row with Amanda and your mother was crying. It was sunny.

"Death is a promise that's always keeping itself." I told them.

Thin comfort, I knew. But once, in your bed, I said those words. You said "I like that," with a thoughtful look and your lips pursed seriously, and told me I should write that down. I did. It's in a notebook with the date in the top right-hand corner.

After I said it, we went to sleep. You built that bed, I told my mourning subconscious. It was almost too high to get into at all, on a scaffolding in your closet. There was a not small window, which only has a view of the sky if you looked through it at an angle, but the moonlight came through over the fence, and it was enough that the closet didn't feel too much like a coffin with the door shut.

My throat is tight in the dream now. I'm dreaming you alive in the cemetery where we'd ride your motorcycle up the green hills, above the trees, and settle by a mausoleum to look out over the city to the bay and San Francisco beyond. I'm thinking about your sleeping body when you had such a high fever that I stayed up all night to make sure you didn't stop breathing.

At this point, we can be fairly certain I'm in REM sleep. If my boyfriend is still awake, he's probably watching my the skin of my eyelids flutter as my eyeballs twitch back and forth in my skull. I wonder if I made sad faces, whimpered, or even orated bravely like I did in the dream. Should there be guilt associated with this? All of it — the night's stage set for my former lover?

The two of them are different. Volatile and ambitious, versus stable and satisfied. I'm happy; why dig up the past? I don't want a restive, absent partner. I don't need the pull of longing to feel the weight of my love. Am I worried?

I can't see him in my dream. I can see the dirt torn open where they were going to put him and I can feel him there, somewhere peripheral and slightly behind.