2023-10-28: city walk

i woke up this morning cold: the weather's been getting closer to freezing, and we've been holding off on turning on the furnace, piling up blankets on the bed to stay warm through the night. the house is cold in the morning, but with south-facing windows, it heats up during the day. we'll do this dance as long as we can. sometime soon, the furnace will come on, and then it's six months to spring.

last night i dreamed about her again, this one in vivid colour. not the mostly-black-and-white or washed-out hues i usually get, but colour, true yellows and reds and greens. i knock on her door. she sees me and laughs. she takes my hands and puts my arms around her. she turns so i'm hugging her from behind.

we go for a walk through the city — like we did once, years ago, she and i and a friend, though this time, it's just us. we walk across an outdoor soccer pitch. it's ill-kempt and weedy. there's a wind, and weirdly, i can feel it. our long hair flowing behind us.

i don't know what this means, don't know if it means. we haven't talked in decades, not since we went on with the rest of our lives. and it's not like we really had anything, not really: a summer of want and yearning, of sidelong glances; then years of occasional, long chats, nights spent online, talking over aim when we managed to catch the other. what we had faint, then flickering, then gone. that's all. that's the obscenity of this.

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