I Dreamed a Dream

I dreamed a dream the other night where
I lost the one I loved.
She left me standing all alone there,
Because my love was not enough.

The moonlight slanted down, sparking off the tears slipping down the soft contours of her face. All around, the wind whispered through the trees, mocking me with gentle, breathy laughter. I couldn’t breathe, a hard ball of some unnameable emotion crushing my lungs. I wanted to howl, to curse, to cry. Instead I simply watched a single tear, as it spilled from the corner of her eye to slowly wind a new track along the unblemished canvas of her skin. The tears were for my benefit, I knew. Not an expression of her sorrow, but of regret for mine.

Her words chipped at my sanity
Breaking my heart.
Perhaps it was simply vanity,
Yet still, I felt torn apart.

Her dark brown eyes swam with dozens of mysteries I had never been able to solve. Perhaps if I had, she wouldn’t just walk away as though I were nothing more than a bad dream she had been trapped in for far too long. Her tears had stopped falling, and she reached for my hand. To comfort or condemn, I still don’t know. I stood, frozen. Encapsulated in a body paralyzed by the swirling storm of emotions inside me.
“Do you even care?” She whispered softly, her voice breaking into a hundred savage splinters piercing my heart. Of course I do! I ached to scream back. Yet my body wouldn’t respond, wouldn’t obey, wouldn’t allow me to speak. She interpreted my silence as apathy, dropping my hand as though she’d touched some withered, rotting thing. The tears swimming in her eyes had long dried up, taken over by a somber indifference. And I could do nothing but watch as she turned to go.

I dreamed a dream the other night where
My love turned and walked away.
I was not enough for her,
I couldn’t make her stay.

She didn’t love me anymore; perhaps she never had. Perhaps I was simply a dream to her: a love she had convinced herself she had found. The words she had spoken spun inside my mind, even as I found myself reliving those terrible moments again and again and again.

I was trapped in a dream within a dream
And it seemed there was no escape.
It hurt more than I could ever dream,
Watching and rewatching as though a tape.

Her breath was soft on my cheek as I hugged her tight. It felt as though it had been years since I’d seen her last. I crushed her to my chest, intending to stay that way for several minutes, until I felt her gentle hands pushing herself from my grasp. My heart plummeted as I pulled back to see her face, painted in a guilty grimace. “We- uh- we need to talk.” She said gently.
Slowly, I nodded, fear knitting the veins in my heart into intricate, painful patterns.
“What’s going on, baby?” I asked, though I felt in my gut that I already knew.
“It’s… it’s been hard,” she said, her voice slipping into a whisper. “These past couple months have been really fricking hard.” She took a step back from me, crossing her arms across her chest. “I’ve done a lot of thinking, and…” she paused, her eyes searching the stars over our heads as though searching for a teleprompter to fill her lines for her. “I don’t- I don’t.” She threw her hands in the air in frustration. “Gah! Why is this so hard to say?”
I stepped forward, my hands reaching for her’s, but she took another step back from me. I studied her eyes, but I could see nothing but decision in them. She had made up her mind already. Perhaps years ago.
“I see.” I murmured at last. As though that were the straw that broke the camel’s back, she finally found her courage once more.
“I don’t love you anymore.” The words spilled out in a rush, as though a lake that had found weakness in a border, tearing it to shreds with every drop that passed through.
“I used to think I did, you know? But the more I think about it, the more I think I was just a dumb kid making dumb promises that I didn’t know myself well enough to make.” She looked at me, pleadingly. “You understand, right?”
The air seemed to have forsaken my lungs, leaving them barren and burning. I stared back with indifference, the pain raging inside not daring to splash over for fear I would lose control entirely.
“I just… I don’t love you anymore.” Her voice was barely audible above the sound of my heart pounding inside my chest like a caged beast straining to tear itself from its fleshy prison.
And slowly, with a feeling like dying, I let her go. Carving out a part of me so ingrained into my being that I had no choice but to strip away parts of myself alongside those fingers of herself she had twined intrinsically within my soul. Tearing out chunks of who I was; of who she had helped me become and dropped them to the ground, leaving me broken and bloody.

I stood there, frozen and alone
And I bitterly cried.
As all I had built and all I had grown
Suddenly, softly died.

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