last night's dream featured an appearance from the man who's more familiar to me than time. except this time, he appeared as my friend, max, an actor with an electrifying smile i haven't seen in almost a decade. max had the most amazing smile--it was like a disco ball lighting up a dark room. but he was a really quiet guy, kind of strange. and he used to call me and not talk, so we would have these long, uncomfortable silences. he once gave me a ride to the airport at 6 in the morning. on his birthday. and my friends swore to me that a guy wouldn't do that unless he likes you. but he told me he was really shy, and in terms of initiating anything, i'm very shy, so at the end of the day, neither of us was willing (able?) to initiate anything. or maybe we both intuitively knew we weren't romantically compatible. i think over the years, life's been hard for max. i once wrote him an email to say happy birthday, and he wrote back a strange email about how he doesn't know much about this world, but he knows that i am a really good person, and there aren't a lot of truly good people in this world. it made me think there was something going on in his life that he wasn't willing to talk about. even recently, we connected over facebook and he mentioned that the last year has been really tough but didn't go into details. he was always like that. a beautiful smile hiding a dark enigma.

so in my dream, i ran into max and he looked the way he did, 10 years ago, with that same smile. but i knew it wasn't really him, it was the guy from my dreams, and when we hugged, it felt like home. my heart cried in relief. he said he'd spent this time apart getting things ready, and had finally bought a home for us. that he hadn't moved in yet, because he needed to find me first, so that we could start our new lives in this new home together.

he took me to it and it was a duplex by the beach, but the construction wasn't completely finished. you had to use the communal bathrooms outside. it was dusk, the sky a rich blue, those few moments before night where it's not dark, but there's a complete absence of light. i didn't want to go into the bathroom because it was crowded, i was wearing socks, and it didn't look clean. so i turned around to go back to the house, but it was empty. he was gone again.