I dream of him in blue and grey.

He is always standing just a few feet away but it might as well be a mile, or a lifetime. Every choice I ever made or just about, all those split second decisions I thought would keep me alive. The times I stood silent. The times I turned down job interviews or job offers because imposter syndrome said I was not good enough. The times I learned how to avoid people instead of how to talk to them.

The times I was too clever and not trusting enough. The way I will trust a thoroughbred horse kicking iron-shod hooves at my head more than I trust a man. Any man.

My man. He’s not mine, I guess. I watched him and pretended not to and every so often I thought I saw his smile break open but I didn’t trust anyone, even myself. I thought, I must be crazy. I thought, I am sure this is not love. It’s just sleep deprivation.

When I was young I sat in the synagogue and felt Something I called G-D. Girls who have religious experiences are not saints, just crazy, everyone knows that. So I learned that I was crazy. I learned to hide myself away.

One face for everyone else. Another face just for me.

And so I organize with If Not Now but I went to Israel and said the word “Palestine” only twice. Years of trainings later, and sleep deprivation combined with a toxic fear of my own community of men and what I was afraid they might do to me.

Having the capacity for desire does not mean I am a hole, absent the capacity for choice or agency. Really. I promise.

The big juicy cunt guys are taught to envision has a mind and a heart attached. With ideas of her own.

How disappointing, for them.

Rejection I think can become an addiction. I was addicted, then. I deserved no better. Racism was still my driver. Assimilate, and you will be safe, goes the song and dance of modern Jewry. Though there is also, as ever, resistance.

Resistance. Me, sure that I was doing him a favor by not “bothering” him. The favor of a lifetime.

Women learn to tamp down what we feel. That our romantic instincts are wrong. That we must always, always be afraid. Mentally, emotionally. That if we are not afraid and then we are hurt, in any way, it is our fault.

Women are moreover not accustomed to being angry nor men to accepting our anger is valid. Is equally as valid as their confusion or hurt feelings.

A person who cannot get angry, who is not allowed to get angry, cannot defend herself. And men are taught to prioritize themselves over us. And women are taught to prioritize men over us. Except emotionally, perhaps.

I did not think to ask him. To change. Or to hear me.

Or if the only thing I was saving by leaving him alone was white supremacist beliefs inside my own head.

What I wanted was to save him. My project was to spare him. From my often sick and weakened body. Nightmare rashes and months of coughing and to get social security you can’t work for a year and you will probably be denied anyway, maybe more than once, statistically, no matter how good your documentation and I have been trying to be gung ho about life while I cannot walk longer than a hundred yards or so without stabbing pains in my lungs.

Israel is a dream and I must have been running on adrenaline. That and I put all of my terror of losing him into trying so so hard to be a fun physically able member of the group even though-even though-

The girl with maybe lupus who maybe can’t have babies who maybe will die in a decade. Less. Who maybe will never be well enough to work like she wants to.

“Will I lose my dignity,” indeed.

Five saved half-books and two screenplays on my computer. I would have trusted him to finish them for me. If.

Well people think sick people go somewhere, when we get sick. Somewhere that makes us well again. Sometimes I suppose it works that way. Usually, no.

I am sick and I smell like it. I am sick and I am too tired to put on eyeliner every day for the rest of my life. I am sick and I worked so hard to survive, I am not saying I regret that, I am saying what do I have to show?

I am saying, I watched him as much as I dared, every single day. I never saw that maybe he was a person with feelings, just like me.

“No one is alone,” wrote Sondheim, which autocorrect just changed to “Somdheim,” which is definitely not a thing. I want to tell him things like that. The strange and wondrous things that get me through the day.

I dream about him and it is better than losing him completely. Sometimes I just dream him, just him, and that gets me through the night.

I am not a witch but I am a witch. I dream the truth, sometimes. In that way that we humans often do. He made me see that being human is not the inherent opposite of being good.

There is a word for that. Antonym? Something more like “contrast.” A c-word. I’ve forgotten it.

He’d remember. I hope he remembers me.

I walked towards feigned stupidity and Elizabeth Wakefield and classist naïveté that my doctors were correct and I would be okay. I walked in the direction I thought would render me most lovable, and him most safe.

Cera in The Land Before Time was kinda sexist but also true. I was a bully, and the thing I bullied into submission was my own humanity. I miss my generation. I miss the life I could have had, if someone had told me much earlier that I deserved it.

I am such a very, very marvelously brave person. I wish I had been brave in the moment he needed me to be. When it counted most.

I’ll stay in the grey with him for as long as he needs me to. I’ll stay.