Dreamlife

When H. disappeared in waking life, he began to appear in my dreams. In the more common variant, I would run into him unexpectedly in some public place and he would explain why he had gone missing. These explanations never made any sense upon waking but they left me with an evanescent comfort. In the less common variant, he and I were doing things together as friends but something hung silently between us, his unmentioned, unexplained absence. These dreams became rare as time went by with no contact from him but resurfaced after he ignored my letter. Finally, in a dream, he offered an explanation for his rancour that was intelligible, though not applicable in any obvious way to our waking life: in the dream, H. was an orphan and was upset at me because I knew information about his birth family. Despite some effort, I can’t recall whether he was incensed that I had revealed or withheld said information.