Page 97 of I Dreamt That You Loved Me

You need some air and some space so you walk all the way uptown then all the way back downtown and you keep your head down because everyone is a stranger and half of those strangers know your fucking name.

“Hey, I saw you on MTV!”

“Hey, you look just like that singer. Pretty sure I saw you on SNL. You sure that’s not you?”

“Oh my god, I’m such a huge fan,” a girl shrieks. “I was at your show at Roseland when you were just starting outand it was ahmaaazing. Like chills, for real. Can I have your autograph?”

She shoves a pen in your hand and asks you to sign a flyer she rips off a telephone pole, but you can’t even remember what your signature looked like, and you don’t know why anyone would want it anyway. You’re a nobody.

You end up in a dark bar for a quiet drink, but some guy moves onto the stool next to yours and starts jabbering. You drink too much tequila and smoke a pack of cigarettes and you ask the guy if he has a car. “Sure. Where do you wanna go?”

You end up back at his place doing lines of coke off the back of a CD case with your face on it, and his girlfriend makes scrambled eggs and says she’ll take you anywhere you wanna go.

You tell her you want to see the ocean. You want to dive into the waves, snort saltwater into your lungs and let the current carry you home.

She says, “You’re cute. I thought you were dead. That’s why I bought your CDs.”

“Guess they’re not worth as much now,” you say.

Turns out she finds another way to turn a profit. Once again, your face is plastered all over the tabloids with an exclusive story. You can’t trust anyone. They’ve spilled the beans that you are, in fact, still alive but apparently, you’re also a drug addict and you stole their car.

A police officer escorts you home three…four?...days later and your living room is filled with strangers. Your wife breaks down crying and takes your face in her hands, searching for something that isn’t there, and when everyone leaves, she kicks your shin and tells you that’s for making her sick with worry.

“A whole search party was out looking for you. I thought you were dead.”

You say, “You’re not the only one.”

Then she says, “I miss you so much. I miss us.”

You can’t bear to look in her eyes. You can’t take one more minute of knowing that you broke her heart and that every day you stay, you’re going to break it a little bit more.

You feel burdened by all this love. You feel like youarea burden.

Her name is Cleo. It’s easy to see why you fell in love with her in your previous life. She has the greenest eyes and the lushest lips. She has a spray of freckles on her left cheekbone, like a constellation, and when she holds you so tenderly and kisses you so sweetly, like she’s afraid you’re made of glass and you might shatter in her hands, you wish like hell that you could feel something other than this vast emptiness.

You’re an emotional wasteland; whereas, she burns so bright. But you can see that this is killing her, and you don’t want to hurt her any more than you already have. You don’t want to keep taking more than you can give.

You don’t want to be here at all.

CHAPTER FORTY

“Do you think he had a premonition?”I asked Eddie after we left the studio and walked up Eighth Street.

We’d just listened to the tracks Gabriel laid down before his surgery and even though I thought some of them were great, Gabriel wanted nothing to do with them. So it was my job and his lawyer’s job to inform the label that they were not to be released.

But the music was hard to listen to. Some of it was really dark and foreboding. I found it strange that he’d recorded two songs that he’d never played for me. The lyrics for one of them sounded like a metaphorical death. The other asked questions,What would you say if I told you my twisted dreams and darkest secrets? Would you run away or would you stay with the stranger I’ve become?

It was almost like heknewwhat was coming. Like he’d foretold his own demise and wondered what our life would become when he was a stranger to me.

I couldn’t stop thinking about those lyrics.

“I don’t know but he was obsessed with death,” Eddie said. “I remember this one time when we were in Australia, must have been about two years ago, he blacked out on stage. Midwaythrough the song he just stopped playing and singing. We thought he was drunk and forgot the words.” Eddie chuckled although neither of us found it funny.

“He never told me about that.” It made me wonder how much else he’d hidden from me. “Nobody did.”

Eddie gave me an apologetic smile. “Yeah, I know. I think you joined us in Japan a few days later. He asked us not to say anything. He was always so protective of you and never wanted you to worry.”

There was a big difference between being protective and withholding important information. If he had to hide things from me, what did that say about our relationship? “Is there anything else he didn’t tell me?” I raised my brows. “Anything that happened on the road that I should know about?”