Why is it that I can’t understand things anymore?

In my youthful days I thought I was in sync with everything, and everything was in sync with me. I always understood my surroundings. But now...

Now it’s gone. It’s like I have been asleep for the last fifteen years of my life. I’ve missed so much.

My years of college, losing loved ones, losing my own parents to a political scandal they were framed for, all the way up to my first nine years as the leader of my proud Hungarian province...

Was it all a dream?

I’ve been sleeping.

And he... he was my waker. Like the beginnings of the alarm clock sounds work their way in some form into the dream you are being torn from. I saw him, felt him... but it was all a figment.

And I woke up just seconds too late.

In my dream he was lively. Spirited, borderline irritating now and then, with a number of physical quirks that made him totally unique to me. Impossible to hold him still. Beautiful. Passionate. My lover.

I tore from the dream with one last image of him, bathed in light, my hand caressing his cheek as he smiled playfully at me. Then my heart skipped a beat, just as one waking from a dream that they are falling from a precipice.

The man I gazed upon now was cold and dead. Though the light still nearly enveloped him, only made brighter by the brilliant white lining of the coffin in which he lay. His expression dull, blank... one I never saw in my dream.

I passed on, letting the person behind me gaze upon the body.

The people at the funeral must have been stunned.

Who is he? I heard them saying. What does he think he’s doing here?

Do you know him?

No, not I.

Who invited him?

For I had only known the deceased as a distant memory of a dream. He was a mysterious figure that had come to me in my sleep. How dare I show my face at his funeral? I was like a child idolizing a fictional hero, and mourning when the actor dies or retires... seeing a person that those actually close to him saw as a human... as some kind of divine being that I in truth knew nothing about. It was all the same. The man in my dreams... did he even exist in the waking world?

I want to go back to sleep. God, let me sleep again. Hold him in my arms. Never wake up.

Then it became a curse. No matter how fervent my effort, no matter how I tossed and turned at night, I could not sleep.

I can’t sleep again. Ever. Because he is gone, my ability to sleep has been lost. My entire world I thought I had... was based from his mind. And just as the idea for a great symphonic score is lost when the composer passes away, so has gone my entire fifteen years of existence.

Those around me. I didn’t really know them, did I?

Excuse me.

I believe I have known you.

Yes, we had some lovely times, didn’t we?

In my dream...