Our Ghost

I dreamt about our son last night. The one that never came into existence, but the one that we had birthed together so many times.

Remember? Let me take you back there.

You are in your bed, and I am in mine. And yet, our voices are tangled together, as though the two of us were as tightly intertwined as the telephone cables that ran beneath our two houses and connected our words, twisting them up into a knot of innocent conversation.

To be seventeen, and desperately break out from your own bed, but have nowhere that you can escape to.

We lay there, together but apart, falling asleep to the sounds, to the whispers of our future. You and me, all grown up, with big dreams in a big city, as if that were all that we needed to keep us together: another place, somewhere, anywhere but the one we were in at that very moment, and then — then, everything would work out perfectly.

So our son was, of course, made up of the stuff of dreams. Because that’s what his parents knew how to do: to imagine something miles and miles away beyond the horizon, something that they couldn’t see but could make out in the November night sky’s darkness.

He came to life in my dreams. I can’t be sure, so tell me now: did you dream about him too?

Our son looked like us. Olive skin that was a mix between yours and mine, my coffee eyes and your copper hair, but just a little bit more muted from my dark, thick locks. I worked journalist hours during the day, and you took the night shift as a jazz band musician at night, and our son grew up reading abridged Shakespeare and listening to Illinois. You took him to school and I took him to your concerts, and that was seemingly all the parenting we thought we needed to do. To be seventeen and think that the rest of your life that lays there before you will be ever so simple.

Tell me now: how could I be haunted by something that never came to be? Something that never happened? Someone that never existed?

Our son never grew up. We, his parents, dreamed him up. But we couldn’t ever imagine him to be any taller than us. He remained a tiny thing, always reaching up for our hands, and us always scooping him up onto our hips. In my teenage dreams, we walked with him on sidewalks, on boardwalks, held his hand as the three of us crossed the street.

And I wonder, did he die? Or fade away? Fade away as we both grew up, grew apart, grew into ourselves and separated our voices from one another so that eventually we stopped talking every night, stop talking every week, stopped talking altogether in a way that the truth is that I don’t even know what your life is like now?

We both moved on, but what — whom — did we leave behind? What did we do, abandoning him in another universe all alone on a sidewalk somewhere, waiting for his parents to come back and pick up their joint dream where they left it off?

Even the potential of love, the promise of something that we could have built together — even when it dies, it doesn’t disappear. It lives on, half alive by all the love you poured into it, but decrepit, mostly gone, an outline of something that was once filled in with color. I know this because when I walk down the street, I sometimes see it. When I listen to that John Mellencamp song that reminds you of me, I sometimes hear it. When I wake up to the sun shining in from the window and remember your voice in my ear all those years ago, I sometimes feel it.

So tell me now, how do I stop seeing ghosts of things that were never mine?