the rooms

Back when he lived across the street, when we sometimes woke up together, the neighbs had the habit of waking up and immediately, before yawning, before stretching or saying good morning or scratching himself or anything, in this very I've-been-awake-for-twelve-plus-hours-already voice, telling me something like "so I had this dream that there were these three bratty teenage girls, and they were being really disobedient, so their dad tied them to the staircase and brought in this motivational speaker in a leotard to give them a talking-to..." First thing in the morning he will remember his dreams with an incredible degree of clarity. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. It doesn't happen every time, but definitely enough for it to be an identifiable trait.

But that's not all. He's also really excellent at my dreams, especially the bad ones. I'll wake up after a bad dream in the middle of the night, and I'll reach for him and say something like, "I dreamt I was being chased by an army of pink gorillas who were trying to pelt me with tiny teacups" and he'll throw a warm, hairy leg over me and, without fully waking up, he'll say "It's okay. It was just a dream. Your mother loves you very much and she isn't upset with you about what you said to her the other day." The uncanny thing is he's almost always spot on.

I was walking down Park Street the other day, past a house I almost moved into right before I found my current place, and I thought about everything that's happened that never would have happened if I had lived there instead of here. My apartment would have been at the back of the house on the third floor. I never would have met a boy dragging a wiggly black puppy down the sidewalk. I never would have met his friends, who would never have become my friends. My life would be radically different as a consequence.

I thought all these things, and this huge black hole started opening up inside me at the notion of how much I owe to the snap decision to take a crappy, mouse-ridden apartment over a different crappy, mouse-ridden apartment. I tried to console myself thinking that what mattered is that I did take this apartment, I did meet that boy and that puppy on that day, I do know his friends, who are in fact now my friends, but nothing seemed to mitigate the gnawing knowledge that but for happenstance, I might currently be living in that sad third floor apartment living out some simulacrum of my current happiness, trying to convince myself it's as good as the real thing that I'd never have known was going on just up the street. Logical fallacies aside, it's a vertiginous line of thinking.

Then I remembered that, the day I met him, I never expected to see him again, and I still did. Maybe not the night that it happened, but eventually, one or the other of us would have mustered the gumption to ask the other to dance. And the world that had started to close in on itself regained its contours. Somehow, knowing that there was a failsafe mechanism in this particular lucky streak was incredibly reassuring.

And now he's here, telling me more of those nutty dreams I love to hear.