we met

A few nights ago I met her in my dreams.  I looked at her, my sister, across the room.  Oh, she's here, I sighed.  Yes, her, she goes here... I think. 

But it is hard to know.  

I didn't ask her, aren't you dead? Because I remember thinking those days were behind us.  

And mostly they are. 

It doesn't happen often- not anymore.  I look back at how fragile I was, how broken.  Tip-toeing over the crust of sadness.  Drifting between night and day as if they were the same.  

I remember the nightmares.  The clicking I thought I heard of her long nails crawling across the wooden floor of my bedroom.  I remember the smells.  The dark stories.  The crossing shadows.  The silence.  The weight of madness on my back.    

I gave to her in her death a few years of my life.  Shaved them right off the middle and threw them away into the dark after her.  It took years to peel the layers of dim from my mind.  Complicated and entangled- like stripping off wet clothing. 

But I think my soul is finally dry.  

She was my childhood.  My best friend.  My most public mistakes. She was my sister... and I try not to feel too guilty when I wonder if she ever really existed at all. 

In my dream, we said nothing I can recall.  It was all so normal I almost missed it.  But in that golden space, before one wakes, where the dream is real and reality is the dream, she broke from under the mask of Dream Sister.  It was only an instant but it was enough to see her as she had been.

Then I was awake and she was once again forever sleeping.  Forever; how incredibly impossible that seems.