I had just decided to let you go. Months of over-analysis, of careful dressing and second-guessing has become too painful, too exhausting. I was about to re-engage in the world.
In the dream you told me that we eat 18,000 cherry tomatoes a year. 18,000. And I don’t know who ‘we’ are.
The fact rattles around, compelling calculations. 49 per day for one person means ‘we’ is not the royal we. It is 24 if we are two. But we are not two and this is too many. I balance the relative worth of logic against intuition and I wonder if you’ve given me the full truth.
Locations haze. We’re sitting on a familiar bedspread. We’re in a club, at church, on the beach. We’re there and then we’re not. We’re in a supermarket. My parents round a corner and they know your name but you’re suddenly not there and you don’t meet them. We’re a near miss.
There are moments when your head is close to mine. I never feel that you will kiss me but every time I think the conversation is done and I start to walk away, you change the topic and we start again.
On waking, the pull of you endures. I suspect I could snuggle in to the warm body next to me and emerge later to forget the whole thing. But I won’t risk it so instead I sit, cold aluminum on bare thighs, glorifying the remnants of a dream.
