Vivre sa vie

Woke up early this morning to the feeling of someone standing in my room, by my bed. It was just a dream of course, but my pounding heart kept me from going back to sleep. It's too calm here, too quiet, mother hasn't been home for weeks (whatever "home" is these days) and the apartment is losing the scent of her perfumes. Chloe leaves in the mornings and doesn't come back until late at night, sometimes we share a bottle of wine but mostly we just sit together in silence with the lights turned off.

I'm afraid we'll run out of things to talk about, and of everything that is still unsaid: about Carl, about her father, about my father. There are no pictures left of him, I'm slowly forgetting what he looked like but sometimes I can see it so clearly in my dreams. When I wake up the images are always gone, impossible to recreate but sharp enough to fill me with an incisive sadness I almost lost somewhere along the way. I think it's the only thing that reminds me I'm still alive.