Dream Lover

He sits on the couch next to me, taking up all the room, all the air. I sit far enough away that we don’t touch, not even accidentally. The movie has started, some Hugh Grant rom-com, and when we laugh at the same things I stop, because hearing our voices together feels too intimate. Because he’s never been here before without papers and notes spread out on the table. Because the lines between us are blurry. Because he is/was my teacher, he is/was my adviser, he is/was married, he is a father. What is he doing here. What are we doing here. No matter that he has left her, worked out custody, got an apartment, and everything’s different. Nothing’s different.

~~~

Dream: We’re at either end of the couch, our legs twisted up in the middle. He absentmindedly runs a finger down the bottom of my foot. We are reading—him, a novel; me, the Atlantic. We are listening to NPR. The Sunday programs—Radiolab, Snap Judgment, This American Life. Someone overcomes something, something ordinary is celebrated. Ira Glass laughs, and we laugh with him.

~~~

He asks if he can put his feet up on my coffee table. I laugh. What the hell else are coffee tables for? I put my feet up and smile at him. He looks so happy he might cry. I think to myself, How have you been married to someone who wouldn’t let you put your feet up on the goddamn table? How did that happen? I will never understand how that happens to him or to anybody. I will never know what might push me to become that kind of wife one day. I will never undo the knot if I keep making her the bad guy and myself the hero. I’m not going to save him from a broken heart, I tell myself. The man I’m supposed to love will figure out how to save himself.

~~~

Dream: We’re in the bathroom, and we’re both brushing our teeth. I’m humming that song from The Elephant Show, remember? Skinnamarinky dinky dink, skinnamarinky do, I love you . . . I do the hand motions, and fresh mint foam runs down my arm. He laughs. Toothpaste kiss.

~~~

He could have backed off. Set boundaries. Kept our thesis meetings over the last year to daytimes only. Waited longer before emailing back. Told me he had to head home after class instead of saying, Got time for a drink? And I could have remembered that he was just a man. I could have kept him human instead of inventing mirror worlds where he was perfect and I was loved and the cabinets were full of organic groceries. I should have known better. But he should have, too.

~~~

Dream: I’m in the kitchen cooking while he’s in the living room grading a stack of term papers. I yell to him. Hon, do you want cheese on your pasta? (I call him hon now, or sometimes buddy or babe.) I am putting cheese on the pasta anyway, big heaps of parmesan, because I already know the answer. Sure, he says, almost without thinking. He’s engrossed in the papers and doesn’t notice that I’ve placed the bowl of spaghetti in front of him until fifteen minutes later. The cheese melts. We share a fork.

~~~

The credits are rolling. He says, I should probably get going, and I don’t argue. It’s one of the last times I will see him like this, just us two. In a few weeks, when the tension between us fails to subside, we’ll agree that he needs to be alone for a while. After a few months, we will only shout to each other across parties or exchange hi-how-are-yous at conferences where there are too many other people. Eventually, I won’t even remember the way his hair curled around his ears, the way his bottom teeth looked like a car crash, how he’d take a deep breath and look down before saying something really good. He will find a way to stop having nightmares about what the divorce is doing to his kid. He’ll date charming women who will cluck their tongues at his beautiful damage, kind women who will fuck him on a bed without a frame. He’ll find a way to put himself back together. And when I look at him, I will see only flesh and blood. I will see the mortal folly I loved, the one that disappeared like vapor.

Me, I learned how to be alone before I learned how to be a girlfriend, never a fiancée or a wife, so I will go back to my default. Takeout and early nights. Locked doors. Too many movies, feet up on the coffee table, popcorn falling in between the couch cushions. Staring out the coffee shop window, thinking about NPR and tangled legs, heading to the farmer’s stand with reusable bags, switching sides in bed because I like my feet a certain way, brushing my teeth with a song, always with a song, and I can’t quite see who it is, but somebody, somebody is singing, I love you in the mornin’ and in the afternoon, I love you in the evenin’ and underneath the moon . . .

Rae Pagliarulo (she/her) is the associate editor of Hippocampus Magazine and has published poems, articles, and essays with Full Grown People, the Manifest-Station, Rkvry Quarterly, Bedfellows, the Brevity Blog, and more. She is a coeditor of Getting to the Truth: The Craft and Practice of Creative Nonfiction (2021), and by day, she works as a consultant, helping Philadelphia nonprofits to achieve their missions through strategy and fundraising.

This essay is a Short Reads original.