You Lived in Your Imagination, Briggs

Unless You Want Him Crawling Through Your Dream

She stared at me. "I want to travel," she said.

And I did, too.

"I want to drive everywhere. Take months. Take off. Just go."

And we talked about roads. And places. And states.

And other places. Countries we'd visit. Places we'd dreamed about.

You know the ones. The ones that don't even have names.

But we didn't go everywhere.

Except. Sometimes. Late at night.

In my imagination we're there. We're driving. And it's raining. Or snowing.

But we don't care.

It's right there -- it's a place I can almost reach. Can almost hear and see and smell and taste.

And I look over at her.

But she's not there. And, if I'm honest, I'm not there either.

On some days, I don't even know if she ever existed. I have flashes of memory (so many flashes of memory).

I have flashbacks and flashforwards involving her. And the car we were driving. Which, for some reason, was lime-green.

And her hair blew behind us in the breeze, riding up and down the hilly San Francisco neighborhood where neither of us has ever lived.

But in the moonlight, sometimes, I can see it. Clear as day.

Even if we're never going there again.

Even if we never were there at all.

Maybe not even in my imagination, Briggs.