Merging

I saw you sick again in my dreams.
Life, death, and dreams—three realms that overlap in ways my consciousness doesn’t fully grasp.

When you fell ill in life, it felt heavy on my soul. Yet in dreams, you stood tall, healthy, free of pain. Each morning, I would wake with the faint belief that perhaps, one day, life and dream might merge into one seamless reality. It was a notion I never fully understood, yet I clung to it with a kind of sacred faith.

I tried to help you heal—small gestures, desperate prayers, the fragile offerings of a mortal who cannot bear loss. Sometimes it felt selfish. Was it love, or was it fear of emptiness? Is it cruel to wish for someone’s suffering to linger, only so they stay a little longer?

I wrestled with these thoughts through endless days and sleepless nights. No answer came. You didn’t have enough life left for me to love you properly. I didn’t say a lot of things because I didn’t want to entertain the idea of us being mere mortals. And when you were gone, my shadow vanished too. There was no longer a struggle, only the slow brewing of emptiness.

Then, some nights ago, you appeared again in my dream. Alive, but unwell. The scene unfolded with such familiarity it frightened me—the scent of your breath, the tremor of your hands, the quiet ache of care returning to my chest. I touched your wounds as though healing could still happen between sleep and waking.

In that dream, I was once again the same person—torn between love and selfishness, between faith and delusion. I thought, if we could just wake together, perhaps life and dream would finally become one.

I still don’t understand the concept.
But even there, in that fragile realm of sleep, I still had faith.

Will it always be an incomplete merging?
Will I ever wake from a dream where you are well?
Is it possible to merge the two—
or is it simply that I am not good at it

?