For years "what if" has danced, slow and languorously, at the corners of her mind, tempting her thoughts to stray from their daily focus when the book she is reading fails to hold her attention or her mind is adrift on waves of song. What if she hadn't been so stunned by his speaking to her that she had responded to him like a normal human being instead of like an academic refugee stumbling dazed out of one of her most important exams of the year. What if she hadn't been so unsure of herself that she locked up her prom date three months in advance. What if she hadn't dismissed him as a jock who would never be interested in her because they inhabited two different worlds; lived different lives, even in the homogeneous cess of suburbia.
Now for several nights, he has fleetingly inhabited her dreams. Fitting his languid, gangly slouch into the rheumy facsimile of her current life. He is not as he was in the past, yet he is still that past version of himself, the only one she knows, eight years after she last saw or spoke to him. She wonders if he ever thought of her, if he too had regrets. Did he wish he had acted sooner or spoken to her more in the few classes they had shared? Had she intimidated him with her honors classes and outspoken independence? Had he held her in awe for being in the smart crowd as she had envied him for being popular and ever at ease?
Ever since the first dream a few nights ago, a dream she can barely remember, but which she knows has unfolded in the murky ether of sleep, a dream that now feels comfortable and warm every time she recalls its lingering touch, she cannot stop thinking about him. She longs to speak to him, to catch up on lost time and opportunity. Yet there is no reason to believe such a thing could ever happen -- and there is a certain comfort in that as well. Perhaps she will learn to be less dismissive -- more open -- in the future, so that she will not be locked in such a sweet morass of unanswerable questions wrapped in the fleeting embrace of inky dreams.
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