Do I know you?

Melissa sits in an apartment. The lights are so dim the only light comes from the setting sun outside the window, played on a flatscreen TV to her right for reasons she doesn't clarify. Melissa sits between the two sunsets. I try to snap a picture of her surreptitiously to prove I saw her, but she is shadowy. All the picture shows is the double sunsets and a fuzzy silhouette.

"I'm hiding out," she says.

This is her ex-boyfriend's apartment. Probably Stevehen. She otherwise did not have an ex-boyfriend, officially. She had guys for whom she was the other woman, whose faithless girlfriend she would have been if they had asked. They did not, and she lacked the confidence to ask. Also, she sometimes slept with them while supposedly in a committed relationship. She had a polyamorous fling with a man and his wife, but Melissa was neither one for sharing nor mentally stable enough to process this paradigm. She badly tried to steal the man away and fabricate drama to estrange the wife, which only meant the couple was justified in cutting ties. Melissa always wanted to be chosen over their girlfriends and wives. The one time she succeeded, it was with Stevehen and was emotionally ruinous, driving him from New York and her further into her untreated mental health issues.

Rob was her fiance, but those were different circumstances, where he is more a "former" than an "ex." I do not think this is the apartment he shared with her. The sun sets behind too many buildings, their shadows tall.

I am not overjoyed to see her, only at my base level of happiness in my dream. I appreciate her wiliness in hiding, though I do not understand the necessity. Why pretend to be dead for...? It is hazy. In reality, it has been more than six years. She could have contacted me sooner, but she didn't. I found her by accident, nestled in the corner of this room. I do not recall how. It doesn't matter.

It seemed credible that she hid out all this time. That's something Melissa might do, maybe to escape her many creditors or ill-wishers.

No. I was at Melissa's memorial service. I remember that, even in the dream. It was artificial and wrong. An urn full of ashes represented her. I didn't see a body, so maybe that was part of the ruse? I don't know how much funerals cost, but it was not lavish.

No. Too elaborate. Melissa is dead of a heroin overdose, one way or another.

I wake up irritated and sad. There was a dream between the apartment's twin sunsets and full consciousness. I stole a school bus because I needed to get somewhere, then returned it within twenty feet because stealing would be more trouble than it would be worth. Also, I did not know how to drive a bus nor cared to learn on the fly. I had a bike and only needed to go a few miles anyway.

Is this a more abstract symbol?

This is not the first dream I've had where Melissa deceived everyone. If anyone were to haunt me, I would place my money on her, and dreams are easier than tossing cutlery at the wall. I do not believe this is her manifestation, only my subconscious, which will never be satisfied she died so stupidly and predictably.

I think of her once a week. In my head, we are still friends. Not as we were at the time of her death, but the closeness of our early twenties. If she resurrected, squirreled away out of sight, we would not be that close. I would not be copacetic with her vanishing, though I would covet the story and beg until she let me write it.

I recently rewatched one of the last videos she posted on an account that unfriended all but one person -- a stranger to me -- a few years ago. She was heavily made-up, and her voice was affected desperation, telling a lie that could not be plainer in hopes strangers would give her money. She wasn't the Melissa I recognized. The Melissa I knew would have brutally mocked this woman, but what did I know of who she was at the end? She was someone over whom her remaining friends -- three of us, aside from her fiance -- exchanged nervous messages and commiseration. Did we genuinely like her? We loved her, but I cannot assert we always liked her. If we didn't love her, we would have let one of her tantrums promising to forget us forever hold weight. Did we consider the person begging and flailing Melissa? I can't say. The one we encountered, the one who looked like a bank middle manager or overcompensating housewife, was the one who held our Melissa hostage or, more likely, was who she could handle being.

Who am I to say any of this? I am not the boy I was at the apex of our friendship, not that I knew it would be. Looking at me, you wouldn't peg me as who I think I am. I pass mirrors and am sometimes startled by the man I see in them. My face is relatively unlined, but I see age -- more so depending on the angle of observation. I feel it more when social media pops up some woman I knew best as a twenty-year-old sexpot, who is now slipping closer to fifty, who fits better into the schema of a frowzy grandmother. I have former classmates who are, indeed, grandmothers -- though she is blessed enough that anyone hearing this would inquire if she had been fourteen when she birthed a daughter who subsequently had a child before her quinceanera. Women I found (and find) beautiful have strands of silver where I remember greens and blues. None of us are who we were; maybe we are not worse for it.

I'm years older now than Melissa will ever be. When I search for her in my mind writing this, when I see her in dreams, she is not the odd woman in 1950s secretary lipstick with flattering filters applied. My Melissa is in her early twenties, uncowed by a life that had not been kind to her and a trickster to the core. My mother said decades ago that she did not know what Melissa would look like the next time she showed up in my driveway and had been confused by the friendly stranger approaching me at concerts. To me, these were variations on a theme. Melissa remained distinct enough from my other friends -- girls who tended to be sylphs, boys who looked as though they belonged in theatrical makeup -- that I was never surprised by a nose ring, dyed hair, or clothes weaving between Woodstock apparent, hot topic, or vintage. To me, who she was at her end defied this.

She would never be anyone's grandmother. She blamed her birth control for a multi-year stretch of worsening mental health, punctuated by institutionalization for suicide attempts, but that cause is unlikely. A connoisseur of illicit substances, a mix of progesterone wasn't going to be what did her in. It is not that she did not have a nurturing instinct. She loved and cared for her pets even when she did not care for herself. She never cleaved to a path that would have made her domestic and plain.

If she wished me to summon her spirit at the side of the fire, I would gather herbs and witnesses. Should she want me to apologize to someone at her behest or finish some business that tethers her soul to the mortal plane, I'm the guy to do it. I imagine any hidden treasure she might have would have been a drug stash she would have emptied during a lean period of sobriety.

I wrote a piece for my author site that Melissa died when she was seventeen. She caused her car to explode in a drug-related mishap, killing herself and the three occupants in a plume of fire. That all four of them hobbled out to a friend's house and were taken to the hospital was a cosmic oversight. Every day since, Death waited to correct the error. Melissa knew it too. She said as much, though she theorized fire would be the thing to do her in. (Melissa did grant other times that she could not do heroin again because she knew she would want to do it until she overdosed. Death chose the subtler end, which might pass as mercy.)

Melissa is not my only dead friend, but she is my closest emotionally. I cannot remember the last conversation I had with the suicidal Todd. I wrote a letter to Karen, who was to succumb to cancer years ago, but spilled ink on it and felt that I was forcing myself into her death where I did not belong. I will always know that my last sentence to Melissa was about her staying home because White Walkers beset the snowy world. I couldn't know she would take a fatal dose of opiates hours after, necessitating something less silly. Had I told her the roads were safe, would she not have died that night?

If she haunts me in earnest, I wish she would convey some message. Even if it were horror or threats, it would be communication -- though I admit preferring something more personal and uplifting to an attestation she is tortured in Hell. Instead, the Melissa of my dreams tells me she is hiding and will return home soon. Once, she, half-zombified, moaned out the agony of her veins still full of embalming fluid, but even that didn't happen in the waking world. I do not know the particulars of cremation, but there had been no reason to preserve her; she was rendered to cremains before the wake, and the urn interred beneath the headstone of her still living parents. I cannot take from these dreams any actionable information beyond keeping her name in the air, so her final death might be postponed a bit longer.

last watched: The French Dispatch
reading: Bluebeard