We had dreams about strangers.
We had dreams about strangers who for one night were not strangers, who returned to their own strange orbits the next day, without any more discussion than an awkward kiss goodbye, in a car or standing on the street beside one. Sometimes we would go out for drinks with them again, months or more in the future, and we would find out they had really cared, that they were just as confused as we were about the world, that none of us knows how to act or how to react in situations like these, that we, us, not they, had created the nothing of it through our assumption that it was only that, that we had created that awkward goodbye by doing what we thought they wanted, by saying see you later and meaning nothing by it at all. Sometimes we would get a second chance, which we would ruin. Sometimes we would never have that follow up conversation, they would date someone else, or we would, and in our sleeping selves that alternate plane of existence would blur until we were not sure if any of it had been real, or if all of it was. Our nights were lost this way. We would almost make a real connection. We would almost fuck this way. We would almost screw up everything. We would almost fix everything. We would make it almost home by some drunkard's miracle, and we would find ourselves the next morning the same people, with the same tightly knotted confusion pulled tighter still. We knew we could not return to the unknowing, though in our daily interactions it was as though we had never spilled too much of ourselves or a drink on you when we meant for it to seem like we could keep the liquid of our hearts inside the glass. We were a marvel of surface tension. We knew too much about density, which things would float and which would sink. We would drown ourselves, a witchhunt act of purification. The liquid would be let from the dam in a trickle, first a beer, then maybe a cocktail, getting the order all wrong of course, and before we knew it we would be strangers again.