Content Warning: Gender dysphoria, suicide. It’s the first time I’ve seen you in five years. In Dreamspace you come towards me, the lone object against dimensionless white. You’re exactly as you were the summer before college with short, bleached hair, your thrill for difference evident in your glittery turquoise eyeliner. You breathe into my ear, “Come with me.” I ask where, but you say nothing and slide your hand into my jeans. I grab your wrist and twist my pelvis away, but you’ve hooked into me. I gasp, and my whole body comes to the spot like mercury. I want to know where you learned this, who you learned it with, but I can’t speak. You liked your nails long, and when I wake up I feel two crescents stapled into the plushy tissue.
I have the day off. I had planned on doing chores, but instead, I fall asleep again and again. In Dreamspace my closet is a vast chamber and I agonize over shirt textures and patterns. When we were younger my looks could never compete with your well-carved collarbone and Roman nose. You were a polished marble sculpture and me an unsanded bumpy project. But I’ve changed. I turn this way and that and blink on one more outfit: a smart ensemble of a cashmere emerald turtleneck, pleated plaid pants, and a raw rose quartz pendant for love. I make my hair a sharp bob, shiny and with a hint of brassy green. I look at myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror and am just recognizable enough. I imagine you breathily declaring that I’m gorgeous.
I slip into my favorite bar in Dreamspace, a place I call the Haunt. The bar is an amalgam of places where I’ve lived in the waking world. Tables lacquered with stickers from local Denver businesses populate the floor, and the bar is one solid piece of river birch cut from the Catskills. I wish I could have shown you the light-peppered skyline against the mountains and the lakes dropped like mirrors among steaming hills. You were somewhere else, lonely, I imagine. Maybe you missed me and wished I was there beside you on a fire escape like a parapet hanging over traffic. There’s still time.
At the table, I brush my hand over a torn sticker and look across at my acquaintance. We don’t know each other’s names or where the other lives. I ask him if he wants a drink. He shrugs, and his pressed suit pants stretch when he crosses his legs. Two drinks appear, a gin and tonic for him and an old-fashioned for me. Briefly, I wonder what he tastes when he sips from the highball glass. I scan the people around us and realize it might seem like we’re on a date, so I lean back. I run my finger up my weeping crystal and ask him if he’s seen anyone new around here.
“Not really,” he says. He pulls his lips down and holds his glass next to his chin. “Why?”
“No reason.”
But as I say it the bar disrupts into a baby green haze and a cascade of grasshopper song. When I stand, the table and my acquaintance swirl away. I didn’t mean to leave the bar and can’t focus enough to return. I turn and see you lying in the grass basking in the yellow wine of sunlight. You’re right where you belong, the focal point of a masterpiece. You notice me staring and joke I should take a picture.
There were plenty of pictures of you though. There were ones of us under too much flash in Halloween costumes. Mad scientist and creation, witch and black cat, hot alien and astronaut – I was happy to be whatever you wanted. Some I took of you sitting on top of a jungle gym for your senior portraits. Against a blue-saturated sky, you skinned the cat with more aptitude than a lathe. You must have blocked me because the last time I checked I couldn’t find any of the ones you took, and during a drunken tantrum in college I deleted all of mine. I knew there were more I’d never seen and tried to find them, but your name bore nothing on social media. I reached into search engines, and with each clack of my keyboard, your name became a warm landscape to explore. Click. My fingertips traced the long L of your ankle joint. Clack. I ran my nose along the C of your ear’s cartilage. When I hit enter, I imagined it rushed off in a whisper and tickled your neck. Still, nothing.
You can find anyone you want in Dreamspace as long as you know their full name. If I do it, I’ll fly to you like a lost filing of iron and land neatly where you’re asleep. A week after the dream I gather the conviction to try. Once I’m by your bedside I’ll gently pull you into Dreamspace. “Is it really you?” you’ll ask. And everything will be forgiven, everything will be the way it should be. I secure myself in Dreamspace, chant your name three times, and expect to soar over cities lit like microchips. I lift my chin to a galaxy-splashed sky but stay as grounded as a shot bird. I wake up. In the real world, I go to my bathroom and clutch the sink’s edge. Without switching on the light I stare into the mirror, my eyes two hard stones with holes for centers. The holes broaden and deepen. I never imagined you would marry. Because I still haven’t done chores, my trash can overflows with Kleenex and cold brew cans, and it crashes when I kick it over.
I can’t picture you sharing your room with anyone else, so I envision you in a tabernacle of your own worship. A room just like your childhood bedroom teeming with every gift you were given. The first time I visited your house I was sick with nervousness, and when you opened your bedroom door my heart rushed against the white cliffs of your teeth. Every surface was crowded with nostalgia. Among the birthday cards propped up by beanie babies and glass figurines I hoped that, because you allowed me inside, you saw me as a gift too. Each moment together, no matter how frequent they became, was precious to me. Would you keep me, hold me until old papery death like the dried roses you kept in the coke bottle above your bed? You wouldn’t possibly throw me away, would you? In the winter of our sophomore year, I gave you a snowball. You put it in Tupperware then wrote my name and the date in silver sharpie with the same smooth grace of a swan nibbling crumbs off a pond. After you placed it in the freezer you explained, “So it’ll last.” My insides became a balloon too full of air, and I had to avoid your eyes or else it’d pop into a million I love you’s.
The next place I look for you is the art gallery. It’s one ticket on the Luas into the Dreamspace city, its outskirts a sudden crown of chrome. I wander inside the gallery’s network of neo-gothic halls and Bauhaus caverns. I spent a semester in Dublin studying architecture, and I rehearse how I’ll explain to you the tension between the two styles: the first a conjure of fanciful romance and the second a concrete embrace of practicality. I reach the wing I’m looking for and gaze at Odalisques reclined among plushies and pre-raphaelite maidens on starships. If I don’t find you here I fantasize about making it a grand surprise. In the sculpture wing, we’ll link fingers and appreciate the polished glass statue of Sailor Neptune and Uranus made all the more precious by each other’s company. I’ll share how I graduated college with an art history degree. I’ll ask if you’re still writing poetry. I pass windows with stone tracery and glimpse the sunny courtyard through the iron mullions. Couples picnic and talk on stone benches and grass. We could be there too, feeding each other grapes fat between our fingers and passing sangria between our mouths.
Viewers paint their reflections on a large gallery’s marble floor. I grow wary as the paintings change into memories of us. In one large piece, you yell at a white truck driving away, and a young man hangs out the window with his hands cupped around his mouth. The smooth blending and uncanny perspective remind me of social surrealism. I sniff, the style and subject matter are too candid for my taste. Engraved on the brass plaque is “(We Are Not) Lesbians.” The painting’s curatorial statement narrates the memory. I remember it well. We walked back from the park near your house, and as the truck drove away you kept your middle finger high like a flag. You complained, “Just because two girls are walking together doesn’t mean they’re lesbians.” The word dropped in me and grew wrinkly with tentative possibility. “Yeah,” I agreed.
In front of the painting, someone joins me and asks what I see. Their hair is black and long and braided. I don’t say anything, and they wrap their thin bare arm around mine. They must sense my grief, so they lay their head on my shoulder. The weight of it covers me like a soft pelt, and they say, “It’s alright.”
I face them and am turned on by their gold septum piercing and eyebrow slit. I ask if I can kiss them. Their lips catch on my teeth like the skin of a ripe plum. Immediately, I’m comforted.
I can’t tell this person anything; it’s too much. I want to tell you, tell you everything about Dreamspace, about my life. I convince myself it’ll be different this time, that you’ll listen. I remember rushing to our shared locker before the morning bell, my newest thoughts on Charlotte Perkins Gilman or my parents ready to spill. But you were always there, your eyes two blazing planets and your mouth full of thorns grown from your newest drama. I listened to you rail against the girl who stole your crush or how a teacher was a dick. I kept my stories to myself, an obedient audience listening to your thistled arias. After each time you asked, “You get me, right?” I would have cut myself open, grabbed my skin like a curtain and let my insides languish out of their cavity and demand an encore. Slick with red, my intestines would spell out, “Yes.”
Yes. Yes. In a fantasy I’ve threaded together in Dreamspace, I murmur I’m better than any man you’ve ever wanted, you know I am. But when I can’t feel the skin of your lips I furrow my brows. I’ve always imagined they would yield like a peach. I continue, but the absence of pressure when I push my tongue on your shoulder, how I can’t see clearly the ombre of dark to light brown in your eyes sprouts an ache that wipes everything empty. I try again, but I catch you looking at an unreal man I hadn’t noticed. I angrily banish you both. When you visited me it was real, wasn’t it? I wake up from the failed fantasy and go outside. The night is as black as my insides, thick with emotions blended into doubt. I find a fallen branch and swing it with all my weight against the pavement. I breathe in bursts like an engine. If I can just find you I’ll know if it was real.
Tell me. Do you think what we had was real? The plane between our clasped hands, the rope of unsaid quips thrown across the classroom, the humid air between our noses when we shared the bed in my room and talked until the blinds sent bars of light across our faces. In all these spaces between us, I sent myself and cached my desires and hoped you’d arrive and tell me you felt the same.
It’s been three weeks, and The Haunt is empty. The bar is littered with stained glasses, and the chairs rest on the tables as if someone will sweep up the used napkins and chip crumbs. I won’t look at the walls decorated with post-its and looseleaf paper covered in our handwriting. When my acquaintance pulls over a chair, I’m glad he can’t see them. We’ve spent enough time here to know our minds furbish these places with our own subconsciousness, working around the heavy facts of ourselves.
He asks if I’ve found who I was looking for.
I say no and don’t mention that the harder I look the more spiteful Dreamspace becomes. Despite myself, I notice the papers are arranged in chronological order. They coat every inch of the wall to my left and the ones behind me then grow further and further apart on the right wall’s shiplap. Love song lyrics scribbled on sticky notes and sincere long-distance letters full of sonnets and sections of Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” drift apart from your short replies. The wall I face is bare except for one framed piece of paper. It’s the last letter I wrote, the one in which I finally confessed my love.
I’m hit with loneliness and I ask my acquaintance if he’d like to go somewhere. He thumbs his collar and says he’s game, and after he follows me out I pull towards a storefront. Inside is a confusion of tipped clothing racks and half-dressed mannequins as fraught as I feel, and I take us to where I know there’s a flight of stairs to the sublevel. At the bottom, I push open the metal door and step into my childhood bedroom. It’s not what I want, but at least there’s a bed. We undress and I hiss, my hands their own mouths working over his arms and chest. I pretend they’re yours but it’s all wrong. He tries to kiss me, but I won’t let him. Instead he sucks my neck until I feel the blood vessels pop. I get impatient, shove him down and lower myself onto him. Too soon he says he’s going to come, and I slide off and look away as he groans and finishes himself. I get up and look at him sweating into the green sheets then look at the bedside table. There is a picture of you and me sitting on it. Your arms wrap me like a bow. I hear my acquaintance sigh, and he is not you. It will never be you.
I don’t want to wake up, not yet. I leave the bedroom and fling myself into emptiness, not caring where I land. My feet settle on asphalt, and my eyes strain in the dark until I make sense that I stand in the middle of a suburban street. I walk by purple lawns and the sharp jawlines of concrete steps and feel the road’s pebbles turn the soles of my feet white. With a click and hum the street lamps light up in sequence. The street rises, and I feel like I’m following the inner tract of a bioluminescent fish.
The street joins a larger road and you stand on the other side, a starkly contoured subject underneath a streetlight. I open my mouth, but I remember how you threw everything away, and your name loses all air. I wait, but you don’t take a step forward. A car approaches, and the wind pushes leaves down the road. The car’s headlamps turn them into papery embers. The car passes by and you vanish with it. Korbin is a disabled nonbinary writer, educator, and former community organizer. Their work has appeared in Kansas City’s "The Object" and Yale University’s "American Literature in the World."
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