I’ve been sat with my fantasies saying goodbye for a while. I fear I might not see them again, at least not the same. The next meeting they’ll be doubled over, suddenly old like a grandparent you haven’t seen in a while, and I’ve been avoiding that too. Time passing in new groans when they stand up, and this reclusiveness isn’t compatible with shouting down the phone. Now I cringe at anything that reminds me I’m, probably because to be alive is to have lost all this, each night spent praying to be in some timeless dream, put to sleep for the duration and I’ll wake up in march; meet my fantasies for coffee all crammed round one table and we all still look twenty-one.

But on inspection day two hundred and something, mirror hour one thousand at least, I’ve found a wrinkle. Like the first grey hair of a coma patient, I’m laying to rest things that haven’t opened their eyes for months.

Old lists laugh in the hospital machine beeping, always seems like they’re becoming quicker. I see myself in slow-mo running towards my lifeless body as a protest parade sprints past, five politicians run 100m in 5 seconds, dizzy with the turning of the ground below me, the beeps go on and on, I’m running and I can’t get there but never flat line, just running

                                            and running

                  and running and

I’m saying goodbye to my fantasies while the world tells me not to be sad; optimism says the body will still be there it’s only the colour that will be missing.

Sunday coffee will be starved till it’s shut down, Paris’ palaces suddenly dusty and vulgar again, New York won’t sing Patti’s songs with an unwanted baby in its arms or blood on a backroad. Can’t shake the sense that all my dreams are going to come back to me haggard and different, and I won’t want to look them in the eye; can’t make conversation with a kind confrontation of how the year has robbed us of itself. Calendars all full of arrows, slipping through months of snakes and ladders, walking through milestones like ghosts.

After the parting I sit for a while pulling at the loose threads of myself, figuring out which ones are essential and which ones I can’t fix anymore.