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In my dreams I always call you buddy. There was this time a couple of weeks ago – I was sleeping, and I was dreaming about you, just like I am always dreaming about you, and in the dream we are in the car driving eastward with the sun hanging huge and low in the rearview mirror. I don't know where we are headed, but it doesn't matter because it's us, and I figure it's fine as long as we are going. But before I can turn my head to look at you we are back in the bunker, opposite sides of the library table, drinking dirt-cheap unbranded beer. It's night all of a sudden, the hands on my watch pointing forever at two and twenty-five. You run your finger along the carvings I made after– the carvings I made after you were gone. You are moving your hand and I can't see which name you are so laboriously tracing, but I don't need to see because I already know. So I watch your pointer slide left-down-right, then up-down-right, then left-down-right-down-left. The room is dark and empty and by the look on your face I can tell there's something wrong, so I ask hey buddy, you okay? But no answer from you. You keep staring at me, unspeaking. And this is when I start to panic, because I'm noticing now that your finger has never stopped scratching the wood, all this time it has kept going, and you are scratching so much, so deep, that you have consumed your flesh down to your first knuckle, your finger just a wretched mush of bone and blood. And when I look up to meet your eyes I find them black and hollow, and all your teeth are rotting, and there are flies buzzing out of your nose. And suddenly, inexplicably, I am chained hand and foot to the table, and I realize that all my life I have always been chained to a long line of different tables. And I am calling for you, with tears and snot and huge embarrassing full-lung gulps I am calling for you, so desperately, saying things like please, please, i'm sorry, and for the first time in a dream I don't call you buddy, I call you Cas. That's when I woke up. Anyways, this is to say that in my dreams I always call you buddy, except this one single time when I called you Cas and I woke up in a bath of tears and sweat.
What I've never told you or anyone else is that I've always dreamed about you. It used to be me, and you, Sam and Jack sometimes, but mostly me and you. It used to be me and you in the bunker, me and you in the car driving aimlessly down nameless two-lanes, me and you in some diner having the best burger in the entire United States of America, me and you sitting on the Roadhouse porch, blazing late-afternoon light in our faces, me and you fishing, me and you at Stanford to find my brother back in '05, me and you laying side by side on some dirty motel mattress, me and you watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the one-hundred-billionth time. Then you left, and everything changed, and the dreams too.
In these new dreams I am never happy, and you are never happy either. Sometimes it's just me, and you are a semi-translucent presence that makes the air in my chest heavy and difficult. Sometimes you are there, real and solid, you hold me down and fuck me until I can't breathe anymore. Sometimes I am looking for you, every which way I try to find you but always come up empty. Sometimes I am out in the woods burying you, which is bullshit, right? Because I would never bury you. But it's in the act, the fucked-up symbolic Freudian imagery of me shoulder-deep in mud and roots and death, digging my way down barehandedly, nails broken and bleeding, and then fistfuls of clumped soil on your lifeless body, my hands bare still, like I can't conceive the idea of using a shovel, or the idea of anything else keeping us apart. Sometimes I lie down with you in the grave, rain pooling in my mouth and earthworms digging tiny intricate galleries inside my pulp, and I always let them.
But there's this one dream I keep thinking about. It's one of those dreams where I'm looking for you, everywhere I'm looking fruitlessly for you, but this time I find you. As soon as I see you I start running, stopping only to breathe when I'm close enough that I could raise my hand and catch you. But I don't. Instead I say hey buddy. I've been looking right and left for you. You smile softly and place your palm on my cheek and I can feel the realness of your knuckles, so real that I lean in, your thumb draws slow curves from my ear down to my chin. And now that my hair is longer you push your fingers through and grab, gently, and pull, also gently, which is the way I imagine you would touch me. And you're looking at me with that stupid lopsided smile and you tell me that i look good. Just like that, you say you look good Dean, and I swallow and say yeah? And you say of course you do, and I say well, thanks, you look pretty fucking good too. And it's just a dream so it's easy for me to put my hand over yours, feel how warm it is, how strong, solid like hardwood, huge like the whole entire universe. And I can only say, buddy– everything else drops dead in my throat. Already I understand how I could never know a world without you, how I could never accept a world where you're not here. And in the dream I tell myself that I would never do anything to harm you, that I would let you use me and kill me before I'd even hurt you, and that's when I know how big of a liar I am, how broken and done-for. One hand covering your hand covering my cheek and the other curled around the cold metal of a gun. You say my name and I say buddy, and you say nothing, so I say buddy again, but this time there's a note of fear in my voice that I can't really help. And slowly but surely I raise the gun and press the barrel to your chest, right in the middle of it, find that slot between your ribs where I assume your heart should be. Hot for a second between my fingers and then it's done. When it's over I fall to my knees and hold you. I put my ear to your ribcage and hear nothing. I don't cry, because you were already long dead, gone the moment you met me.
But if I could see you one last time, I'd tell you all the things I could never tell you about. I'd tell you hey buddy, Cas–