On Muscle Memory and Him

I woke up with an idea, but it is losing its helium, so I will try to get it down as my coffee drips through the filter and my son sets the train up. Upon waking, he wants me to be the train so he can be the crane, and there is not a world in which to this I say, no, I need to write. But I do need to write. If I do not get this out, it will mill around inside of me all day, bothering me like a headache behind my eyes, until at last, it is gone, and with it the words. This is how it goes some days.

I dreamt of Josh. I say this becuase I never dream of him. I never ever dream of him. Not even when I thought that I loved him. For those ten years he was not even real, real only to me. A planet I visited that no one else knew was even in orbit. A privilege I held so close to my chest I almost killed it. I did. Although it was not my fault. What we know now about what we were, we never would have held up in the real world. Our relationship existed in a vacuum of our own making. Like reality TV, it would have crumbled under the weight of reality. Did I love him? In ways more than anyone. But in ones that matter, no. I never really knew him, and yet his existence in my life was like a glacier slowly cutting a canyon.

There was a specific feeling with him. I have not been able to ever conjure that feeling that was produced with him, oxytocin flooding my body in a basement bar Mexican restaurant off the Sunset Strip. Perhaps because being with him existed outside of my reality, it was already dream-like. So perhaps that is why seeing him in this dream seemed so tangible, I could touch the feeling, hold it in my hands like a firefly. And even now, I can feel it: a heat, a fluttering in my chest that turns and turns, asking to expand my ribcage, a buzzing promise of something interesting about to happen to me. Our bodies hide these truths, hidden in muscular tissue, away from us, but it’s still in there, accessible only by a sleight of hand. And it asks a question I have always wondered – where does the love go when it is gone?

In my dream, we revisit spots across LA or an amalgamation of cities in which we would meet. In the way dreams tend to mesh things together into one, the whole in place of the many. While he and I were always the many in place of the whole. Always just one night, months apart, hotel bars and roadside motels, backstage or on a tour bus. Letters sent. Endless messages received. He would disappear entirely in swaths of time, so I was left to believe I imagined him. However unlikely he was for me, from the moment I saw him, I was under a spell that I could not break out of, a spell that only lost its power when the two of us finally lost touch. Enough space can, in fact, change us.

So, why is this important? I tell my writing group that I lead on Saturday mornings and Wednesday nights that it’s about the muscle memory, that we have to give our dreams context to make them relatable to other people, to make our readers understand why I cannot get over this dream or off the floor. But isn’t this the truth of all writing, that without the context we are just putting words in the air, space in between us and the page? How can I see Josh in a dream and feel the way that I did in Las Vegas the night we rolled windows down in the taxi and drank Burbon, and what else? Or the time we stayed at the Travelodge and the Christmas lights, but it was February. Or in Minneapolis, when we took the band’s van back to the motel in the suburbs and ate Texas Toast at that bad restaurant in the morning. And he dropped me off at the sculpture garden and I walked back to my friends house, shoes in hand, like it were all a movie. How then more than ever, I felt like his girlfriend. How I was never his girlfriend. A hundred scenarios I could tell you. A hundred ways in which all of my twenties, I tried to shape myself into someone he might find interesting. How the person I am today, is not by accident, but by design. And maybe there is more truth in that than I care to admit.

Where does the love go when it is gone? If we become different people on a chemical level when we love someone, and are dependent for a decade on that feeling or even a moment, then does it really leave us? Or does it stitch itself into the fibers of our muscles and weave a path through who we are? Are we made up more than we might believe by the very people who are no longer with us? I am trying to reach a conclusion, but there is none. I don’t think I even have a single photograph of us.