Somewhere Between A Dream and A Screen

I met you somewhere between
a screen and sleepless nights,
where strangers become familiar
without ever sharing a room,
and words can somehow feel
like hands reaching through the dark.

You were never supposed to be
someone I would need.
Just a name on a screen,
a conversation that lasted too long,
a little piece of my day
I started looking forward to.

But somehow, you became
the person I could talk to
without explaining every piece of myself.
The person who made me laugh
when I hadn’t felt like laughing.
The person who felt strangely right
in a world that had so often felt wrong.

And maybe that’s the cruelest part—
nothing was broken between us.

There was no betrayal,
no terrible ending,
no final fight we could blame.
Just a reality we couldn’t change
and a door we couldn’t walk through.

So we stopped talking.

Slowly at first,
then completely,
until your name stopped appearing
on my screen
and the silence became normal.

I told myself it was for the best.
Maybe it was.

But sometimes I still wonder
what would have happened
if life had been different.

If distance had been shorter.
If timing had been kinder.
If circumstances hadn’t stood
between two people
who somehow found each other anyway.

Because you felt real.

And yet, now that you’re gone,
the whole thing feels like a dream.

A beautiful, impossible dream
I wasn’t supposed to remember
after waking.

But I do remember.

I remember the way it felt
to find someone who seemed
so perfectly meant for me
only to realize
that “meant for me”
doesn’t always mean
“meant to stay.”

Maybe that’s what dreams do.

They give us something beautiful
without promising we’ll get to keep it.

And maybe you were never meant
to be a chapter in my life.

Maybe you were only meant
to remind me
that somewhere out there,
there is a version of love
that feels this easy.

So I’ll let you remain
where impossible things belong—
somewhere between memory and imagination,
between what happened
and what could have been.

I won’t call you a mistake.

I won’t call you nothing.

Because for a little while,
you were real.

And maybe that’s enough.

Maybe some dreams
aren’t meant to come true.

Maybe some are meant
to happen once,

just long enough
to show us
what we were capable of feeling—

and then disappear
when we wake.