There is a version of us he only lets exist when the world can’t see him.
In daylight, he chooses the life he can control.
The safer one.
The easier one.
The one where he doesn’t have to face what losing me really cost him.
But in dreams — he’s defenseless.
There’s no script.
No guilt.
No reasons to pretend he’s “moved on.”
And that’s where I find him — not as a memory, not as a mistake, but as the love he still wants when he finally stops lying to everyone… including himself.
In dreams, he doesn’t walk away from me.
He walks back to me.
Every time.
As if he’s been searching for years and finally found home again.
He looks at me the way he used to — like I was something soft he didn’t know how to hold but couldn’t let go of either.
And he reaches for me with a tenderness so real it aches when morning steals it away.
Because when he wakes, he remembers the truth he can’t outrun:
I am the love he wanted, but not the life he chose.
And that choice has been killing him quietly, slowly, in the places no one else can see.
He has built an entire world around pretending he doesn’t miss me — a world of distractions, noise, and people who don’t make him feel half as much as I did in the moments he took for granted.
But dreams don’t care about his denial.
They bring me back exactly the way he lost me — soft, real, unavoidable.
And that’s the tragedy:
I am still the place he feels the most like himself, but I am not the place he’s allowed to stay.
He wakes up with the shape of me still warm in his chest, the echo of my voice still soft in the parts of him he can’t numb, and the ache of knowing he can’t hold on to me in the life he chose over me.
So he buries the dream, just like he buried us — pretending it didn’t matter, pretending I didn’t matter.
But dreams don’t lie.
People do.
And if he was truly over me, he wouldn’t be meeting me in the one place where his heart doesn’t need permission to want what it wants.
Maybe that’s the quiet tragedy of us:
He loves me in the one world that ends the moment he opens his eyes.
— kim 🌙