hello world are you there it’s me r |

I saw you in a dream I made up: so handsome, so debonair.

I like to imagine that it’s true to life.

I hugged you close, your raspy cheek against my own.

Your bloodshot, ‘I’m so ill’ eyes clouding over and there is something dark in them…

Now, I do not know if I imagine this so childishly; as though I am sixteen again and still enraptured by ideas of true love and forevers and yearning for things I knew were not for me; or if, after all, this is no imaginary attraction. Am I filling up the lines with in-betweens that were never written? Reading thoughts that were never thought at all?

You see, self doubt and I are cosy friends- we chat over cups of tea that are stone cold by the time we sip them; the heat gone out of them surely as it leaked out of our eyes and into the world, taking with it every confident thought; reducing my voice into less than sure, polite firmness replaced by question marks at every end.

An interrogative question is not the same as when it’s marked by a barely-there quaver in your voice.

Once I knew a boy and I called him anything but his name.

It kept affection at bay. The words hiding from endearments lest he leave in a fit of feeling too much too quickly; in a fit of feeling too much or when what he’d really wanted was nothing at all.

I am not ready for a relationship he said. I’d smiled at that, ‘I never asked for one’.

My naivety was only clear to me, apparently.

He’d knocked on my door; my footsteps muffled by the carpet; my eyes sleepy-surprised and greeted by him slumped on my doorstep; his voice slurred

‘You are so warm, my good girl’.

and instead of my name, he called me his good girl,

cradled my head against his chest and kissed my hair.

Sometimes he whispered things he didn’t know I heard.

And in moments like those, I nearly called him by his name.