I'll Lose You in the Stars

Another Lazurus

Last night, I dreamed of you.

I am so surprised, so overjoyed to see you before me. Your cheeks are flush with life, and your eyes- they're open! The speckles of gold in them glow like the little campfires you liked to tuck along the shore. A hope like I've never felt before, an urgency like I've never felt before, shoots through me. I feel its pulse in my chest, in my fingertips, in my temples, in my wrists. This is my chance. I open my mouth to warn you. You need go to the hospital. You have to go now! But before I can say anything, I am hit with a stipulation. This second chance has strings attached. I am not permitted to say the inevitable. I can't speak of the future or everything will rot. The brief hope I have congeals into a harrowing dread that snarls in my veins. My tongue is fat and heavy, the roof of my mouth so dry that I can feel the blood welling in its cracks. The harder I try to urge you, the more arduous it grows to to speak, and the more confused and frustrated you become. Your tone, your posture, your expression, they're all screaming that you are going to leave. After all, you are a busy woman and you have a never-ending pile of work to attend to. But I can't let you go; I have to save you this time. To my horror, you push back your chair and began to stand up. We're going to lose you again. This realization swells and swells until it can no longer fit inside my skull, begs the bone to buckle. I can't endure the agony of the pressure anymore; I need to drain these fears from my brain, the blood from yours. Finally, I explode. "You're going to have a heart attack! You're going to die! You need to go to the hospital!" The crushing tension is immediately extinguished as I watch my words reach your eyes, see my terror-matter dripping off of your skin. You look at me with understanding, as if you are remembering that day you collapsed, as if you are seeing yourself through that glass panel, through the hundreds of eyes that choked out their final goodbyes to you. And, for a moment, I feel I have gotten my miracle I have so desperately prayed for; I am about to witness another Lazarus being raised. But then, the seem of the world cracks as if it is an eggshell and the world around us begins to fall apart. Pipes twist and burst. Hunks of heavy rubble fall from the sky. The debris piles up between us, reestablishing a devastatingly familiar barrier. As the fractures widen, as the fragments preserving this illusion of a second chance are ripped away and swallowed up by the vacuum, I realize that the stone will not be rolled away from your tomb. For, I have broken the one rule I was burdened with.

When I am spat out of the nightmare, I remember how the debris of my hysteria ate little holes through your clothes as you viewed your world closing up, and I taste the acerbic tang of guilt on my vain, treasonous tongue.